Myrtle's First Tatoo

  Endless summer hydrangeas are the chameleon shrub.   The shaggy Mophead flowers shows off monstrous blooms in bursts of colors that range from strong luscious blues to magenta pinks.   When it rains, the petals will manage to catch and hold tiny raindrops in perfect suspension.  Another wondrous thing about these shrubs is the color of the blooms can be changed by adjusting the amount of aluminum to the soil surrounding it; thus dubbed the chameleon shrub.  I know this because I am experimenting with my own.   I had been planning on working in my garden today. I consider myself to be a very passionate gardener.  It’s therapy for me.  When I garden, my grandmother often comes to mind.  She was an enthusiastic gardener herself.  I tend to plant a lot of the same things as she did her garden.  Hydrangeas being one of them.  I have taken root samples and bulbs from her garden and transplanted them to my own.  She has been gone now ten years.   Her memory is still close for me.

      There are many stories to share about her but the one I’m thinking of today involves her first trip to the Omni Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia.  But here’s a little background on my grandmother to start.   She was Maw, Maw Ray to me and Miz. Myrtle to her family and friends.  She was born in August of 1908, raised in Birmingham, Alabama and the oldest of eight children.   With the growing trend of flappers and the social vigor of the roaring twenties being her role model she was basically a rebel.   At fifteen, she felt she should express her individuality and to spite her father, she cut off her hair.  Prior to her pruning job, her hair had been to her waist.  Afterwards, it was to her ears.  Her father, himself a barber, needless to say was not amused.

Myrtle’s early life was basically simple but ideal while growing up.   She had always lived in “Birmingham’s Downtown District”.  But in her sixteenth year, tragedy struck her family.  In the winter of 1924 at age 43, her father died of respiratory failure.  At the time of his death, the family was told this great line in a very slow, but dramatic way by an aging physician.  I can see the performance in my mind as if it were on stage today.  A stooped over physician bent double from osteoporosis, white tuffs of hair protruding out behind his ears stood while waving his arms to the heaven’s,  delivered this line with the fluidity that only a southern gentleman could. 

“I am so deeply sorry to inform you but Mr. Jones has passed.  He has died from acute exposure to hair inhalation.”

Remember, I did say my great-grandfather was a barber.  To this day, I can’t say I have ever heard of anyone since dying from acute hair inhalation, but I could be wrong.   

  After the death of her husband, my great-grandmother closed up the barber shop, sold most of her belongings and moved her very young family to a small community in Oneonta, Alabama to live with her parents.   Her children, ages three to sixteen, still grieving from their father’s death, were told they would have to work the fields in order to survive.  With Myrtle being the oldest of eight, it is easy to imagine the pressure on her.  To add a little more insight; my great-grandmother was only 33 and having so many children, marrying again was probably not an option.  

 When her father died, Myrtle’s simple, ideal world had ended.   She had to move in with relatives who were dirt poor and now she was expected to farm for a living.  Oh, how she hated living on the farm.  She hated everything about farming.    She hated helping with all those children.  Who could blame her?  Her world changed in a moment.  She was seized by the back of the neck out of a lifestyle most would consider to be simply refined and thrust into a void with no possibility of escape.

Myrtle resolved to find a way out and eventually did get away from that farm.  Back to Birmingham she went and she moved in with her two Aunts, Vinnie and Genie.  She had lots of possibilities but love managed to bar the way.  It wasn’t long before she was assaulted by a sinful temptation; the lure of a very good looking young man. Yes, she married that good looking young man and then had four children and 5 years later found her way back to the farm she had hated so much.  How tragic is that? 

 But time to move on with the story.  Despite her many living arrangements, my grandmother always lived within a relatively short driving distance from her family.   But one day around 1965, all of that changed.  The youngest of her four children, Ann, announced she and her family were moving.  I am pretty certain Ann dreaded telling her family her news.   Lord, I do know the earth trembled that day.  That one particular day came with the news Ann’s husband had a new job and it was to be in Atlanta, Georgia.  Oh heaven has been overthrown and hell now reigneth over the earth.  One of her children was going to move one state over. 

As Myrtle moved into her geriatric years she could actually rain down fire and brimstone.  Those who don’t believe such a power exists should ask many of my family members who will bear witness that indeed it does.  And you never crossed that woman.  She was never wrong, never had been wrong, and never would be wrong.   One could never say she was missing a backbone.  It’s pretty certain she invented it and informed God hers was to be made of iron.  

Myrtle never missed church. Never.  She was always telling everyone she encountered they should find a church and make of point of attending.  She would bear witness in elevators, grocery stores, and even in front of parking meters. She was relentless in her pursuit of finding out if you attended church.  She was out to save the world all by herself.  If an individual replied to her, “Yes ma’am, I attend church, every Sunday as a matter of fact”.  According to her, you obviously didn’t go enough.   If an individual attended church every given day of the week, even if a person slept in the pews or underneath the pulpit, it still wouldn’t have been enough to appease Myrtle.  She was a devout Christian.  She was always on her toes when it came to what was wrong in your life and she had no qualms about telling you about it.  She would tell you how to solve it and when she expected you to rectify it. 

When her daughter Ann humbly told her mother of her husband’s transfer, Myrtle gave her youngest daughter a verbal lashing equivalent to no other.  

“How can you abandon your family and move away to Gawd knows where!  So you think you can just pack up and waltz yourself clear across the state line and life will be wonderful.   I can’t believe that good-for-nothing husband you married has convinced you to move clear across country away from your family.   He thinks he can buy you out of anything, doesn’t he?   I told you not to get involved with that family. But no, you wouldn’t listen to me.   We’ll never hear from you.  I know it.   You must have just lost your ever loving mind that’s all I can say”.


         My mother used to say that last comment to me growing up; ever loving mind.  I do believe I have used it on my own children as well, but what’s an ever loving mind and how do you lose it?

 I would actually hate to have been my Uncle at the time.  I’m sure if words would have been weapons he would have died from stab wounds from an ice pick.   I am almost one hundred percent certain she picked away at the very core of him.  But they moved anyway.

My Aunt and Uncle were probably settled in about a month before Myrtle went to that wicked, corrupt City of Atlanta to rescue her grandbabies and bring them back to Alabama.  It has been told Myrtle expected to find them living in a rotted, rat infested, house next door to a sewage treatment plant.    Over time, and I mean a long time, my grandmother came to accept that her youngest child would always live in Georgia and there was nothing she could do about it.

Myrtle was also one who was very particular about her attire and the way people would regard her appearance.   She was very pristine with her dress code.  She did evolve over time but as it took man millions of years, so did it take Myrtle.  It was something instilled in her and took a hammer and chisel to remove; one layer at a time.  The 60’s definitely broke fashion trends with Go, Go boots, false eyelashes, crazy psychedelic prints, five inch wide ties and in the late 60’s early 70’s, The Hippie Movement.  This definitely broke Myrtle’s Law.   Myrtle did not follow this fashion trend; often opposed it openly.   Imagine a debate between Myrtle, the mild mannered, bible wheeling Christian lady from Alabama and those who promoted free love.   I would have sold tickets, made a fortune and would now be settled into retirement.

 Over the years my grandparents made the journey to Georgia several times.  During one summer visit, the plan was for everyone to tour the Omni International complex/hotel in downtown Atlanta.  My Uncle tried to explain to my grandparents that the Omni had an indoor ice skating rink, restaurants, and a multi-screen movie theater.  His attempt to entice his mother-in-law into having a good time seemed like it was going to work.  In truth, he was praying it would.  Myrtle in her faultless blonde bouffant wearing a chic blue pantsuit with matching scarf journeyed out with her family for an early lunch.  They had lunch at a picturesque little restaurant which surprisingly to Myrtle and to the others, she thoroughly enjoyed herself.  After lunch, they proceeded to the Omni.  Now today I live in Atlanta and there are those times when I feel a little squeamish about visiting certain areas.  It was decided by some omnipotent God on that specific day Myrtle was to be introduced formally to the country’s new dress code.  As I remember this account, my cousin Scott said they were about to turn into a parking deck next to the Omni and then Uncle Jerry was forced to stop at a traffic light.  People were going to and from the Omni and were in such multitudes, traffic was at a standstill.  People paraded by in a multitude of scantly costumes.  Other’s decorated in a multitude of getups congregated on the sidewalks.   Myrtle was given the front passenger seat with Uncle Jerry driving and the rest of the brood was in the back seat.   At first the family thought they were about to escape a day without any preaching but soon found out they were mistaken.  Myrtle took one glance at her surroundings and began one of her lengthy sermons.

 “Dear Lord Almighty above.   Jerry, I know you have completely lost your ever loving mind, bringing us all here.  Oh Dear Lord, the end of the world is coming!  You mark my words.  It’s right here before us! The Bible is being fulfilled right here in front of us right now this very minute!  It’s the end of the time!  The last days!  And I want you to look.  Look right there standing on the sidewalk. That is Satan in the flesh it most certainly is.  In that, that get up”!

About that time, my cousin Scott and everyone else in the car happened to look to the right passenger side window as Myrtle was still laboring on with her evangelization.  The man she had deemed “Satan” strode up to the car window opened up his shirt and leaned the front of his chest against the front passenger side window.  He had two large eyes tattooed around each nipple.  Needless to say Myrtle had a conniption fit that day and never did get to see the Omni.

I must confess there are more than a few similarities that I share with my grandmother.   Similar in our love of gardening, our desire to go against the grain, and our determination to always win, no matter what the cause.  Yes, I am indeed her offspring, yet not a blood relative.  Myrtle lived to the age of 92 and although she never quite had another encounter as she did that one  particular day, she did travel many more times to visit her daughter Ann and in her own way developed a love for my adopted home of Georgia.