Dolly

Born in Kyrene, Arizona, in an adobe hut, May 24, 1905, my grandmother was the second daughter (Viola born two years earlier) of Edward Barnett Stewart and Mamie Bell Weller.  Her father had a band and played the harmonica.  Her parents divorced when she was only two.  By the time she was seven, she had moved to Canada with her mother and stepfather (who nicknamed her Dolly because she was so little with curly blond hair), lost her mother in a wagon incident, and moved back to Arizona again with her natural father and stepmother.  In her words, “I wasn’t afraid of hardly anything.”  Not even of Haley’s comet, even though her stepbrother told her, it had a dipper that scooped up little children and carried them away. 

By the time she was eleven, she had lost her stepmother to cancer, been abandoned by her natural (louse of a) father, lived in a tent with her thirteen year old sister, picked cotton to survive, and was found out by authorities who put her in an orphanage.

And I thought I had it bad because I had to walk to school, over a mile away from home.

Taken from the orphanage to care for another family’s children, she managed to attend school, and then at eighteen or nineteen moved to California with very little money to get a better job as promised by Ben Lang, my soon-to-be grandpa.  She told of having a cousin who owed her $1.  She borrowed a dime to take a street car to collect her $1.

Ben and Dolly had met when they were young teens.  He’d grabbed one of her garters while she skinny dipped in an irrigation ditch.  She found it the next day wrapped around her horse’s leg.  He was smitten.  “I’ve never seen anything so pretty as you,” he said, “standing there with your hair down.”  Heck, that line would have got me, too.

Ben and Dolly married before they were both 21, lost a home in the Great Depression, had six children, lost a teenage daughter in an automobile accident, and divorced after thirty five years of marriage.

Grandma never had a mean word to say about anyone and had a great sense of humor.  Never once do I remember her wishing her life was anything but what it was.  She was right, she wasn’t afraid of hardly anything.

She was one in a million, my grandmother.  After 92 years, she succumbed to Alzheimer’s.  There isn’t a day that I don’t think of her and the example she set for me.  Now she’s Heaven’s dolly.

Related posts:

1. Just like Grandma
2. Rubbing shoulders with the Greatest Generation
3. Homonym humor
4. The day after
5. My grandma can beat up your grandma