N.B.: I’ve been inspired to write a little more here in the sense of a journal, and I will. I got to thinking journal-type thoughts while I was AFK [Away From Keyboard]. I hope you enjoy.

Riding in the car with my grandmother is always a dicey situation. If you know where you’re going, she relaxes and will talk about whatever’s on her mind. If you’re relying on her for directions, she can’t relax, as I think she realizes that her sense of time and distance is horrible, and she’s always watching for where you’re supposed to turn … or at least she should be. Either way, it always requires me *not* to relax, because I either have to make idle conversation or keep myself ready to make a turn at a moment’s notice.

During this trip, I was knowledgable of where we were going; my grandmother hadn’t been to South Mississippi for over a decade, if memory serves. Since I was in control of the car–despite the fact that I spent the entire time trying to get comfortable in the eight-direction power seat; since I had too many options, I kept trying to find the optimal one–she wanted to control the conversation.
I find that conversation should be a two-way street, although I often realize my own ability to attempt to control them. I find myself attempting to [and sometimes succeeding] interrupt people with whom I am conversing. But I have always abhorred one-way conversations where the road was paved over my objections. It is no less with my grandmother … who asks questions that I usually don’t want to answer directly.

I guess that fact frustrates me. As a family, we hide things from her. Part of it is that she rarely listens to what we’re really saying, preferring to hear what she wanted to hear. For example, she knows nothing of my calling to ministry [that I know of, anyway--I figure if she knew, that would be all we would ever talk about]; the reason for that is that she’s always wanted me to do it. “You’ll make a preacher, Geof, if you want to,” was something I’ve heard more than a few times. I never wanted to do it when my will was fully my own; and now that my will is mostly God’s [minus the times when I wrest it back out of my own sense of foolish pride], I want little else.

But why not tell her? Well, she’d imagine that a calling means for-sure-and-certain that I’d be in a pulpit somewhere. I don’t know that for certain. If I did anything “less” than that in her mind–and truly, I don’t consider youth or music or other ministry functions “less” than ordained eldership in my mind–she’d be heartily disappointed. And, because of how my grandmother always wants to force everyone to meet her sense of how things should be, her disappointment would just add more to the “resentment” side of the ledger.

Do not get me wrong; I love my grandmother. She loves us the best way that she knows how. She’s much younger than any of her [all now-deceased] siblings, and as such, she usually got her way [within reason]. She’s the only one of the girls to go to college, and in terms of a career, I guess the “made more of herself” than the rest of them. But then again, I don’t really know that for sure and certain; I never knew my Uncle Bob, who died long ago, and my Uncle Ned had retired before I was aware of what he did for a living. My Aunt Tommie always worked the family dairy farm, and my Aunt Bessie died in the ’50s, if memory serves.

While I love my grandmother, I don’t always like what she does. She placed incessant pressure on my mother to lose weight, and she still does so with me. Of course, while well-intentioned, she never quite realized that, perhaps in some ways, Mom’s weight was a function of rebellion against her mother. Mom wanted to lose weight, and she was doing so before the stroke. Post-stroke, she’s lost a lot more–on the order of 100 pounds, last I checked. Of course, as Mom says, “I don’t recommend the method.”

My grandmother has the single ability to drive you nuts by getting into your head and pressuring you to do what she wants you to do. It’s always forced my family to give her less than perfect information on what’s happening, from the last days of my grandfather’s cancer [when she would have shut down emotionally if she'd known] to Dad’s various job shifts.

She realizes that she meddles; she told me about how she and one of her friends had tried to set my brother up with a local school teacher. Realize that my brother lives four hours southwest of my grandmother’s little city here in Alabama … it was doomed to fail before they even met! Yet she snuffled a bit about how it didn’t work out, and that it all seemed to be on my brother’s end. Of course, I can just guess how Doug saw it: yet another in the many attempts to get us all to move to a town of 2,000 in Nowheresville.

The latest attempt was in asking me where I’ll work after graduation. She didn’t say it directly, but she intimated that she wanted me to put in at the local 3M plant. Not to be unkind, but not only no, but hell no. I’ve had all the small-town living that I’ve ever wanted, and I already have enough time getting dates as it is. I don’t need to decrease the eligible female population any, and I certainly don’t need to move to a place where the manufacturing situation is tenuous at best.

You can see from reading that I have a lot of pent-up frustration from those many miles this week. Most of them have been relieved herein; but you need to know that I was happy to drive her. I’m all too familiar of late with how fragile life is. My mother’s mother is in pretty good shape, physically, as is my paternal grandfather; only my paternal grandmother seems to be totally “with it” mentally, but she’s starting to look her age. I was glad to see them all at once … even if I did have to put up with the Spanish Inquisition.