Can You Be a Good Grandmother and Dig in the World Down Under?

My Nanny, “The Bait Boss”

An Anthropology-Inspired Grandmother Sciku:

No cookie baker. No white hair or sober shoes. Nanny rocked the world.

Two Drastically Different Grandmas

Maw-Maw, my paternal grandmother, was as transparent as Saran Wrap. No hidden motives, no mind games, no sharp tongue. She was music and word-play, and faith rolled into one smiling, white-haired, wrinkled-skin package.

On the other side of the family tree, the branches weren’t so straight.

My maternal grandmother was the daughter of an itinerant gambler in a tough home in a Southern Indiana river town born in the first decades of the 1900s. She left home early, married at seventeen, and gave birth to six children, only three who survived, one of them being my mother.

She was “Nanny” to us.

Nanny Diverse Talents

Nanny was a hard worker. Her modest homes were always interesting and beautiful because she had a knack for décor. She sewed beautifully, was a good cook, gardener, and fisherwoman.

Her resourcefulness was legendary in our family. During the depression, she picked apples from their backyard, cleaned and polished them, and arranged them in a basket with a pretty cloth underneath before she walked to the train station to sell them.

Nanny’s natural beauty and sense of style made her a fantastic saleswoman, and she worked for several decades as a top saleswoman in the jewelry department at Stewart’s Dry Goods in Louisville. She was skillful at upselling additional pieces, at knowing what to offer a customer looking for the perfect accessory, and at delivering flattery to increase a sale.

When she wasn’t working, she was crafting exquisite miniature dolls or painting intricate flowers on china. Nanny had her own kiln and sold her beautiful china pieces at shows.

When Nanny wasn’t making magic with her creative hands, she was camping, fishing, or boating. In their retirement, my grandparents, Nanny and Baw-Baw, spent as much time as possible in their little camper, fishing on the banks of lakes and rivers throughout the Midwest.

What a dichotomy.

How could she be so glamorous and talented in one moment and then be so outdoorsy and sweaty in the next?

Bold, beautiful, and barbed-tongued

Nanny was a tough lady who overcame a difficult childhood, was strong and independent long before it ever became fashionable, and who attempted things many other women wouldn’t.

By all accounts, she was a knock-out beauty who kept her hair dyed strawberry-blonde, wore sheer black stockings and skinny high heels well into “old age,” and got a speeding ticket for going eighty miles an hour when she was seventy years old, and the limit was fifty-five.

She once found a bag of marijuana when she lived in Florida and just had to “experiment” with it so she would know what all the fuss was about. (Did she really find a bag of it just lying in the gutter in the early 1970s?)

Did it mean anything that she went to church weekly but could snidely deliver barbed comments to unsuspecting victims? Like the time we were with her at a funeral. Someone said, “Hello, Iona. You look great.” Her response was a cutting, “Thank you. You’ve gained weight, too.” Was there any significance to the fact that she belonged to a Sunday School class of older women who sold KNIVES as a way of earning money for their charity projects? (She was the top saleswoman, and they were wonderful, sharp, easy-to-handle knives. But still.)

Barbed tongue aside, Nanny loved her “grand-kiddos. When we were little, Nanny would take each grandchild for a special day with her, just the two of us together. She always made sure that it was a memorable event.

On my appointed day, Nanny took me to Woolworth’s where we sat at one of the Formica-covered tables in front of the soda fountain. I had a grilled cheese sandwich and patted my little velvet purse filled with my life savings of pennies and nickels while I ate. Nanny patiently helped me count them out so I could “shop.” We found Mother a tiny Christmas candle, and I bought a roll of butterscotch lifesavers for myself. (Obviously, Nanny made me feel very special. I was only five and can still remember what I ate and what I purchased.)

The Riddle of Nanny

Gorgeous. Talented. Hard-working. Artistic. Fun-Loving. Out-Spoken. Judgmental. Difficult. Nanny was a puzzlement, for sure. A kind of living riddle that I often tried to figure out.

A riddle: What do the following words have in common?

Earth. Tape. Ring. Gummy. Book. Grub.

First clue: Children believe that they can play pinochle on their snouts.

Second clue: On a beautiful, sunny, spring day, they remind me of my Nanny?

The answer: Worms.

Yes, it’s a puzzlement.

What does Nanny’s character have to do with those squirmy things that early birds get? Who in her right mind would say that fat, red, slippery worms flopping around in upturned earth, remind her of her grandmother?

I would. (Such a fascinating woman with a million facets to her façade.)

The Dirty Secret in the Filing Cabinet Downstairs

When I was about ten, I remember obeying Nanny’s orders to descend the stairs and follow her into the bowels of her basement.

For years, my cousins and I had played shuffleboard on a painted court on the tan linoleum of the basement floor during family gatherings, so it’s not like I hadn’t been down there. Nanny housed her kiln down there in a little walled-off room, but beyond that, there were nooks and cubbies hidden in the recesses of this subterranean warren I had never explored.

Weaving around stuff in the basement to a dark corner, I found myself in front of a stack of gray file cabinets in Nanny’s basement. She stood regally next to me holding a plastic bowl like a chalice. It was filled with coffee grounds and table scraps.

“Open the drawer, Miss,” Nanny commanded.

I knew better than to hesitate, but I was completely bewildered.

What was she hiding in there? Some kind of art project? Maybe a small pet, like a hamster?

Shivering with anticipation, I gripped the steely handle.

“Come on, Missi. Let’s not take all day doing this!” Nanny chided.

A weird but good smell emanated from the second drawer as I pulled it out. A moist, earthy scent, like the garden after a gentle rain. In a million years I wouldn’t have guessed that the drawer would be completely packed with brown dirt.

Making a clucking sound with her tongue, Nanny slid open the other gray, metal file drawers. No files. No stationery supplies. No paperwork or pictures or paint supplies. Instead, damp, dense compost overflowed. Each drawer held a moveable, miniature farm.

Baiting Beauties

Nanny’s dyed blonde hair was perfectly coiffed. She wore sparkly earrings, rose-colored lipstick, and a pink sweater with beads sewn all over the shoulders. Just like she always taught us to do, she pulled her sleeves way up over her elbows. Then chuckling, Nanny reached in and plunged her brightly painted fingers deep into the dirt.

I couldn’t help but cringe. Getting dirt under my fingernails has always grossed me out. But Nanny was grinning as she pulled her clumpy, black-dirtied hands out of the drawer. Her fingers emerged writhing with hundreds of wiggly, squiggly, squirmy red worms.

I squeaked out a burp of amazement and disgust.

“Look at those, Miss! Aren’t they beauties?”

“Ugh. Nanny! What are you doing? They’re not “beauties,” I rebuffed her, queasy at the sight of those things crawling through her fingers. The term “bathing beauties” suddenly mutated in my mind to “baiting beauties.”

“The worms crawl in. The worms crawl out…. The worms play pinochle on your snout…They eat your eyes. They eat your nose. They eat the jelly between your toes.”

Gross! Gross! Gross! Lyrics slithered unbidden through the coils of my brain, an “ear-worm” at its fattest, finest best.

“Ah, Miss, but they are beauties! They are GREAT! You just don’t understand what they do. All I have to do is feed them and keep them in the dark. Did you know that they love coffee grounds?”

Seemed to me that anything kept in the bowels of the basement, fed in the dark confines of a locked drawer, and hyped up on rotted coffee droppings couldn’t be all that great.

According to Nanny, she was making a killing at the local bait shops where she delivered her home-grown worms a couple of times a week.

The Bait Boss

Who would have thought that a beautiful, sophisticated woman would be making extra cash dealing worms to dinky little bait shops along the Ohio River?

Seemed just a little “underworld” to me, and I kept imagining Nanny as a glamourous spy making the pre-dawn rounds in the river mist, frequenting old gas stations and fishing huts as some kind of “Bait Boss.” Her rise in the world of fisherman’s food was just another example of my grandmother’s amazing resourcefulness and ability to make money out of nothing.

Chutzpah, she had.

I have no idea how long Nanny kept up her worm-works. I don’t know what became of the filing cabinets in the basement or how much money she made on those nasty night-crawlers.

I only know that long after she has departed from this earth, she still haunts me, arising like a smell from the damp earth at the oddest moments. I see her talent fighting with her tongue. Her drive overcoming her demons. Her judgment still hovers near me, but it beats against the force of her love, like a moth beating itself to death against a light.

Nanny’s memory lingers on, wiggling forever in and out of my consciousness like those daggone silly worms.

“The Bait Boss” is a chapter excerpted from Melissa Gouty’s memoir, The Magic of Ordinary, available anywhere online books are sold.