Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Feb. 4, 2013

Good mother-in-law

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There's a problem humor columnists have when it comes to dealing with serious topics. Readers always assume there's a punch line in that column, somewhere, and that's what they look for. But there will be no punch lines today; a couple of anecdotes, maybe, but no punch lines.

Marilyn's mother, Lola Calaway, died on January 24. She was 89. She'd had several strokes, was comatose, and we all knew what was coming. Now that she's gone, we've had a little time to remember her life. It was a remarkable life, and she was a remarkable woman.

As a young woman, Lola, her husband Alfred, and their family moved north to the Detroit area. Work was available up there, and both Alfred and Lola were used to hard work. She'd worked in the cotton fields as a youngster, and Alfred had worked in cotton mills and coal mines. I suppose that made factory work seem less odious. Whatever the case, Lola worked hard for years to help provide for her family, and even when her daughters had grown and married, she was always there to help out. All of her daughters and their husbands, at one time or another, lived with Al and Lola, and she never considered it an imposition. It was just part of her job. She loved her family.

In the last few years, Lola's health deteriorated and she slowed down considerably. I prefer to remember her as she was when the years had not yet taken their toll.
Lola was not what you'd call a socialite, but she was by no means timid. One of my favorite Lola incidents occurred back in the mid '70s, when Al and Lola moved back to Alabama from Michigan. I flew from Atlanta to Detroit and drove Lola and a truckload of furniture to Sand Rock. I'd been a juvenile diabetic for years, and Lola had seen several of my more serious insulin reactions, which if not attended to immediately by food and something sweet, often wound up with me acting even more foolish than usual. Somewhere in Tennessee, while heading south on I-75, I realized my blood sugar level was dropping, so I told Lola I'd have to pull into the next truck stop. When we sat down at the counter, the waitress arrived with a plate of food for the trucker sitting next to me, and Lola commandeered it immediately. Rather than waste time, Lola walked over to the trucker, snatched up his plate, and said “He's having an insulin reaction and has to eat now!” She set the plate in front of me and told me to eat, which I did. The trucker looked a bit confused. I suppose I looked confused, too. But Lola wasn't confused at all. She may have been small, but she was a determined little woman, and she didn't waste a lot of time in idle chatter.

I always enjoyed Lola's memory. She was not what you'd call a natural storyteller, but she had a mind that could capture and retain details. I was in awe of her ability to remember birthdays, and even in the computer age it was obvious to me that just half of the birthdays and birth details she carried around in her head would have caused the most powerful computer system to crash. If you ever discussed birthdays with Lola, you'd know what I mean. She didn't just remember family members' birthdays, she remembered family members' distant cousins' next door neighbors' birthdays, and would tell you how they all fit together like puzzle pieces. “Harold Lester,” she would say, “was born on August 6, 1934. He was my cousin Lela's neighbor's boy. I remember that day because it rained until noon and was just a week and two days after Dr. Henry Corning's wife had her baby. His name was Marvin, and he weighed 12 pounds 5 ounces. Dr. Corning was born in August, too, but that was August 23, 1899, which was the same year Iris Neville was born, only on February 22.” You couldn't trip her up, and it wasn't just birthdays either.

Once, on a trip to Decatur to visit our oldest son, Stephen, who is autistic and was living at the Wallace Center, Lola happened to mention one of her uncles, who'd stolen a cow when he was younger. It was during the Depression, and he and a buddy had decided to liberate the cow. They weren't exactly stealing it, they only wanted to borrow the hide for awhile. Now Lola was a child when the cow was liberated, and so I figured I could catch her on this one. “Bet you can't tell me the color of that cow,” I ventured. I was wrong, of course. “It was brown and white. I remember because the sheriff identified the hide when they were caught.”

I have lots of other memories of Lola. For example, I remember well the day that I took her for a ride on the road behind their Michigan home on my motorcycle. She loved it, but Alfred stood in the garden, eying us suspiciously. He was not a motorcycle fan, and felt she was taking her life in her hands sitting on the back of that little Kawasaki two-stroke, with smoke belching from the exhausts. To this day I'm not sure if it was the ride or the fact that it aggravated Al that she enjoyed most.

Most of all, I suppose, I remember how, as we came to realize just how seriously handicapped our son Steve was, Lola was always there to help. And there were many times when he was almost more than we could handle. More than anyone else in either Marilyn's or my family, it was Lola who really demonstrated her love for Steve. Whether he was in Decatur or Birmingham, she seldom missed a trip to see him. He was her grandson, and he was always on her radar screen.

When we attended Lola's funeral, Steve remained at his group home in Piedmont. I don't think he'd have understood.

What I do know is that every time we pick him up to go get something to eat, he will want to see “Memaw.” As far as he's concerned, she'll still be alive and well.
Which is not a bad way to think of Lola.