I Know An Old Lady by Candace Pope “... who swallowed a fly. I don’t know why she swallowed a fly. Perhaps she’ll die.” The giggling pre-schoolers sat cross-legged on the floor around my chair as I strummed my guitar and sang the silly song. Their eyes lit up when the spider “wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.” The verses continued with her gulping a bird to catch the spider, then a cat, dog, goat, cow, and horse. After the horse, “she’s dead, of course.” I am fast-approaching old-lady status (thankfully), and, unlike the bug- and animal-swallowing lady, I do not expect there will be a song about me. But I do hope I will be happily remembered as the “old lady who...” Like the way I smile when I think of my great-grandmother. Great-Grandma Gilmore was widowed in middle age and had lived with my grandparents since before I was born. She was less than five feet tall, had snow-white hair pulled back in a bun, and though she was only in her sixties when I was small, it seems to me she was always about eighty-five. My cousins and I still enjoy imitating Grandma’s squeaky voice and remembering how she shuffled from room to room on creaky, linoleum-covered floors in her fuzzy slippers.
36 | ON M AG A Z I N E N ACORNER ME FAITH EVERY
She called cars “machines” and sat on the front porch on warm afternoons and counted how many went by. As long as she was able, she walked to church every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening. I have a photo of her with her Sunday School class; ten white-haired ladies posing at the front of the sanctuary wearing long black coats, black hats, heavy-heeled black shoes, each one holding a black handbag. There’s not a smile among them, but that’s okay. I know they were having a good time. Another name that always brings smiles and laughter at family gatherings is Great Aunt Madeline. She was loud and talkative and somewhat flaky. She and a friend had once walked into a restaurant where Aldo Ray, a movie star of the 1950s, was having dinner. Everyone turned as Aunt Madeline shouted, “Oh, look, Mabel! There’s Waldo Fry!” As the story goes, neither she nor Mabel received an autograph from “Waldo” that day. One of my favorite elementary school teachers had gray hair and old-lady shoes like Grandma Gilmore’s. I liked her because she laughed a lot and seemed to enjoy being with kids. During a math lesson, she once asked us how old we would be in the year 2000. When one kid answered, “Fifty,” I just knew there was no way I would ever live to be that old!
