Retrospection on Granny Grace

Granny said Regina should write a book. A book about Granny.

Regina’s response was that if she did, it would be after her mother is in Andalusia City Cemetery. Good thinking, I think, given their opinions on how things are, were and will be, and their willingness to share them.

Eva Grace Hartin Brogden will be 90 when her October birthday arrives. She’s tired of living on her bad days and afraid she might die on her good ones. She gets lonely by herself but won’t budge from her home of 50 years.

She hates paying taxes, loves Medicare and knows more about medicine today than she did 28 years ago when she retired from Andalusia Hospital as operating room supervisor.

She is for the war in Iraq when our side is winning. She’s tired of her beloved President Bush but just can’t vote for Barack Obama. That’s not racism at work, it’s politics. She wouldn’t have voted for Hillary Clinton, either. Mainly, she’s supporting John McCain because he’s a Vietnam veteran, and he won’t raise her taxes.

Granny hopes nobody perfects an automobile engine that runs on water because using water as fuel will cause a run on drinking water.

She had rather keep drinking water and drilling frantically for oil. She doesn’t drive her 1999 Taurus much, so high gasoline prices are not her problem.

A water shortage would, however, land at her front door.

She’s never had much for journalists, which means that Regina and I have been disappointments for close to a half century. But she loves Fox News because it is fair and balanced. Fox gives her news she wants to hear the way she wants to hear it.

Granny is a God-fearing Southern Baptist who has concerns about her only daughter’s liberal Methodist beliefs that clash with hers.

“What would she say about you in a book?” I asked her when we visited last weekend.

“Well, she could say how right I had been about everything,” she said, with a chuckle. “But I bet she’d say I’ve been a pain in the butt.”

Tom Wright is exectuive editor.