ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 24, 1995 TAG: 9512260015
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
TYPE: COMMMENTARY
SOURCE: DONNA ALVIS BANKS
My grandparents and I were related by time, not by blood.
Time's thicker.
I was 5 years old when my mother married my stepfather. Suddenly, people I had never met were relatives. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. Grandma and Grandaddy.
The first time I saw Grandaddy, I looked up to him.
I had to. My head barely met his waist.
I grew taller over the years but I never stopped looking up to the soft-spoken man who called me "gal" even after I became a mother.
Once a year at Christmastime, the family got together. We crowded around the steaming woodstove at the homeplace outside Radford. With heaping plates of country food balanced precariously on our laps, we shared the holiday meal.
I always went back for seconds.
Grandma - her head rimmed with a halo of snow white hair and her blue eyes twinkling - loved to see us gobble up her sweet creamed corn and yummy dressing balls.
After we were stuffed and warmed by the woodsy fragrance of burning logs, gifts were handed out and stories of the past year exchanged. Then, we slipped into our coats and mittens and hats and piled into cars to go our separate ways.
I wonder now if the house seemed lonely as Grandma and Grandaddy put away the remnants of the holiday feast.
I doubt it.
They were married 65 years this past June.
Although they always sat on opposite sides of the Old Brick Presbyterian Church (an old-timer's tradition), Grandma and Grandaddy were never apart.
I hear John Donne's poetry when I think of them:
"Our two souls therefore which are one. ... "
But I don't think they ever read Donne.
They read the Bible. They went to church. Their lives were simple and unhurried.
Grandaddy drove the car. Grandma rode beside him.
She spent much of her life in the kitchen. For several years she was the "lunch lady" at Bethel Elementary School.
"She was my favorite lunch lady," a former Bethel Elementary pupil (who's now 36 years old) told me. "When I went through the lunch line, she would always give me a little extra helping of the foods I liked and just a dab of the ones I didn't."
The uncles and aunts threw a big party for Grandma and Grandaddy when they celebrated their anniversary last summer.
They sat smiling and happy together as friends and grandchildren and great-grandchildren gathered around them.
"Happy anniversary, Grandaddy!" I told my gentle grandfather.
He clasped my hand. "Happy anniversary," he repeated.
I noticed then that he seemed frail.
He died a few weeks later. Cancer had invaded his body.
I saw Grandma at his bedside in Radford Community Hospital. She was smiling, as usual, but her hands clutched a tissue that she twisted round and round.
"My grandmother was with us physically, but her spirit was with him," my cousin Kim said at Grandma's funeral.
A little more than five months after Grandaddy's death, Grandma passed. She went suddenly in her bed Dec. 7.
Daddy found her propped up on pillows. She had been working a crossword puzzle.
Preacher Joe McCoy remembered a lifetime of faith and commitment as he spoke at her funeral. He talked of my grandparents' devotion to the Lord and to the Old Brick church.
The aunts and uncles and cousins blinked tears as he talked of their faithfulness. Like me, I imagine they were recalling their own memories of Grandma and Grandaddy's devotion to each other.
I expect, too, that Grandma just wanted to spend this Christmas - like all the others - with Grandaddy.
And I imagine that John Donne wrote poetry for those with the kindred spirit of my grandparents, Hansford and Blanche Lynn.
"Our two souls therefore which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat."
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Blanche and Hansford Lynn.by CNB