Peculiar

All of us have peculiarities in our personalities. It’s what creates our character, traits, and individualities. It’s the reason we are who we are. Just like our DNA determines our physical appearance, our oddities are what make us distinct and separates us one from another.

The peculiar person I am writing about today is my wife Cindy’s grandmother Pearl Elizabeth Morrison. By the time we were introduced, her husband Benjamin Vincent Morrison was deceased and she was renting an old converted, clapboard-sided school on the Bear Run Conservancy in Mill Run, Pennsylvania. Her closest neighbor was Falling Water, the famous Kaufman home, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Pearl was a solidly built woman who had a tenacious mind and just as tenacious hold on life. She held her own views on life, even telling Cindy that I should “keep my shoes under my own table.” Pearl kept her home just so, hating to see anything out of place and if it didn’t fit what her imagination saw, she would cut, reshape, or repaint it to fit her liking. The value of things in her small home was reduced or destroyed by her changes. She sawed the middle portion of a hutch and fastened it to its base before shellacking it in oak varnish. She cut flannel sheets in half to fit the cot she slept on at the side of her dining room while her bedrooms remained pristine.

 Another example of her tenacity was holding onto an idea that she hadn’t fully worked out of her system with her kid’s birth. She named one of her girls Elma Jean, but wasn’t quite through with that combination, because she named my father-in-law Elmer Eugene Morrison. He hated that name and chose to go by his nickname Bud. I can see why. Who’d want to carry a name so similar to his older sister? That’s almost as bad as a boy named Sue.

Pearl had a stroke which limited her mobility. When Cindy and I visited her in the hospital, she was proud to show us how it limited her ability to raise her right arm. I said to her, “I’m going to go to get the nurses.” When she asked why, I said, “I want to see if they can find a paint brush. I’ll bet you could lift it higher with a paint brush in it.” She knew she was branded with her tendency to paint things and she quickly caught the meaning. We had a good laugh.

Peculiarities? We all have them. Take a look at yourself and have a good laugh.