She pronounced it wuh-irld<\/i>, sliding the r and putting an i in front of it, in that sugary, black-dirt way, like old bluesmen pronounce it. In Minnie\u2019s \u2014 and Muddy Waters\u2019 \u2014 enunciation, the word has two syllables.<\/p>\n
We had a drink and watched the wuh-irld<\/i>, then, in the form of the news from Afghanistan and Iraq. Minnie was dismayed by the wars \u2014 she had had relatives in both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam \u2014 but she was elated by the 2008 presidential slugfest. A tenacious career woman, she\u2019d voted in every presidential contest since suffrage was granted, except in the 1920 election of Warren Harding, for which she\u2019d been too young. Graduating in 1924 from the University of Montevallo, formerly Alabama College, the state\u2019s first women\u2019s school, she went to Birmingham to teach, following her uncle and namesake aunt, both late-nineteenth-century Alabama educators. When her husband, my grandfather Joseph \u201cDaddy Joe\u201d Vaughn, died in 1953, Minnie enrolled in a master\u2019s program at Vanderbilt \u2014 at fifty \u2014 and taught through the late 1960s, churning out hundreds of students.<\/p>\n
She reveled in her retirement as she had in her work, traveling to Paris, Rome, London, New York, Japan, Norway, and her beloved Greece, puckishly referring to her jet-setting as her \u201clittle-old-lady-in-tennis-shoes\u201d phase. In the early 1970s, she dipped behind the Iron Curtain to Yugoslavia. Marshal Tito\u2019s intelligence service dogged her with a \u201ctour guide\u201d named Jidranka, whom Minnie, in vintage Southern fashion, ruthlessly killed with kindness as they toured Belgrade.<\/p>\n
Fifteen years ago, as her ninetieth birthday rolled around, my mother, brothers, and I thought, okay, the matriarch is cresting the rise, let\u2019s blow it out now before the down slope gets too steep for her to enjoy it. This is Alabama, after all.<\/p>\n
We called in tents and tables, hired bartenders, bought a truckload of liquor and another truckload of the hickory-smoked pork for which Alabama is famous, invited a couple hundred people from across the South, and prayed for good weather. They all showed \u2014 relatives, friends, decades\u2019 worth of Minnie\u2019s students, old neighbors, new neighbors, everybody who knew and loved her, ever. Party lasted for three days. People were swilling Bloodies in the yard when the trucks came for the tents.<\/p>
We coasted on this until a few months before Minnie\u2019s one hundredth. Jesus, where did that decade go? We might be forgiven for not noticing: Late into her nineties, Minnie \u2014 captain of the 1922-1924 Montevallo basketball teams \u2014 had been sinking baskets in games of D-O-N-K-E-Y with her great-grandsons.<\/p>\n
My mother\u2019s idea for the hundredth was a tea dance; Minnie was in college in the 1920s, and tea dances were what people did. So, we rented out a ballroom at the old Tutwiler Hotel, bought another truckload of liquor, and invited the same crowd \u2014 minus a few faces \u2014 to dress up as flappers and swells.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/gardenandgun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/GG0308_Family-History_01-1100x839.jpg\")
Photo: Photograph courtesy of Bess McLeod Weissinger<\/p>
Surrey Ride<\/p>
Minnie Holman far right, in 1914 at her cousins’ farm in Coy, Alabama.<\/p> \n <\/div>\n\n
Minnie held court in one corner of the ballroom while a pianist played hits from the twenties and thirties. I found Dr. John Eagan, Minnie\u2019s general practitioner, one of Birmingham\u2019s most revered, and thanked him for helping her get to this day.<\/p>\n
\u201cSorry, son, but I didn\u2019t have a damn<\/i> thing to do with it!\u201d he said jauntily under his twenties-style snap-brim. \u201cShe\u2019s just made of good stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
That good stuff took her to each new day and enabled her to be herself, an outrageous anachronism, with her ancient French china and a handkerchief tucked up the sleeve of her sweater set. She was parochial, and worldly; a farm girl, and a sophisticate.<\/p>
She exercised her contradictions with relish. In 2003 I was down home for another visit. She got up from her drink, went over to the secretary and pulled out a small nineteenth-century revolver.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always wanted you to have Brad\u2019s pistol,\u201d she said. \u201cCan you take it back to New York?\u201d<\/p>\n
Her brother Bradley, my great-uncle, had been a cavalry officer in France during World War I. His pistol was a .32 caliber service revolver with a lanyard, worn in a holster but with the lanyard around the neck so that if you fell, your pistol would stay with you.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d love the gun, I said, but I\u2019d like to keep it in the secretary here in Alabama. Minnie and I had had long discussions about 9\/11. The rules had changed for airplanes, I explained. The gun would get me in trouble.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou mean you can\u2019t take it on the plane?\u201d she asked incredulously.<\/p>
No, ma\u2019am, I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot even,\u201d she said, drawing herself up in her chair, \u201cif you carried a note from your grandmother?\u201d<\/p>\n
The last party we had for Minnie was, of course, her wake. Off the sanctuary of First Presbyterian in downtown Birmingham, there\u2019s a chapel named for Minnie\u2019s aunt and uncle. In her remarks to the assembly, my mother, Sara, observed that Minnie lived so long that she, Minnie, began to introduce me and my brothers as her sons.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow that she\u2019s gone, and since they are my<\/i> sons, not hers<\/i>, I\u2019m here to put the record straight,\u201d Momma said. It was the perfect joke about Minnie distorting time. People roared.<\/p>\n
My daughter, Eliza, and my wife, Sarah, sang an old Scottish song, \u201cWild Mountain Thyme,\u201d a cappella, in step-down harmony, as the Louvin Brothers would drone it. The song has a sweet line: Go, lassie, go<\/i>.<\/p> And so she went.<\/p>\n Sometimes in Alabama in December we are lucky to get a soft April day like the Saturday of Minnie\u2019s wake. The weather allowed a garden party hosted by her niece Ann Oliver. The sun was hot and the party flowed into the garden, as Minnie would have enjoyed it. Minnie\u2019s cousins, the three McLeod sisters \u2014 at eighty-six, ninety, and ninety-four \u2014 showed up with a 1914 photograph of Minnie on their farm in the fringe-topped surrey.<\/p>\n \u201cYour grandmother really loved that surrey,\u201d said Bess McLeod Weissinger to me.<\/p>\n Minnie never gave us much chance to speak of her in the past tense. It\u2019s what good wakes do: People practice talking about the honoree in the new circumstance, beginning with a new tense for the verbs.<\/p>\n Minnie made that really difficult at her wake because she had made her life span seem so normal when it was anything but. Father Time hadn\u2019t killed her so much as she had tied him<\/i> up in knots, for decades. The people a generation younger than Minnie were grandparents, or had died. Their children, Minnie\u2019s third graders in 1959, were middle-aged. Going back beyond Minnie was also hard on the brain. Two Minnie life spans ago, Napoleon was marching on Moscow. Three Minnies ago, the United States did not exist. She threw all the clocks off.<\/p> As a result, nobody, not even Dr. Eagan, who had made a house call on Minnie the morning she died, could believe that she wasn\u2019t at the party.<\/p>\n \u201cI saw somebody sitting in her chair a minute ago,\u201d Dr. Eagan mused. She had a customary chair at the Olivers\u2019. \u201cI had to stop myself from telling \u2019em to get up because Minnie was coming back,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How a South Alabama farm girl lived to be 104<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":52866,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1784],"tags":[295],"authors":[1829],"issue":[2362],"recipe-type":[],"class_list":["post-159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-and-culture","tag-alabama","authors-guy-martin","issue-may-june-2008","location-alabama"],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n