BIRDIE LULU By Mary Combs

Birdie Lulu was my great-grandmother. A force to be reckoned with, or so I’ve heard. She died just after I was born but left a legend in her wake.

I heard stories from my father of a tall, formidable buxomness woman who would come to eat and immediately after her last bite demand to be taken home. One day my great-grandfather came home with a pack of hound dog puppies. Birdie Lulu immediately went outside and dispensed them all with a two-by-four.

I have always wondered how my gentle, modest grandmother came from such loins. My grandmother would only whisper the word ‘sex’. “Sex.” I inherited my grandmother’s modesty becoming pink with guilt at the age of 12 after allowing the boy on the green banana bike to massage my back under my sweater.

Birdie Lulu looked over her shoulder for her entire life in fear of being murdered by the man she had left behind to marry my great-grandfather. I found him on Ancestry.com last summer and wished I could go back in time to tell her that it was okay, he had married and raised a family shortly thereafter. She was safe. This insight into her vulnerabilities made me occasionally wonder if there was more to this woman than just a nasty countenance.

One of the few tangible items I have of Birdie Lulu’s is her dining room table. My parents shortened the legs and used it as a coffee table when they first married.  It was a stinky table. The varnish had gone rancid and so it languished in a basement storage room. I’d think about it from time to time and lugged it from house to house. I just couldn’t get rid of it because, after all, it belonged to her. The mysterious her.

While visiting my aunt one day I heard the story of how Birdie would embarrass my grandmother by playing the piano while popping her dentures in and out of her mouth. She would spit them into her hand and then throw them back into her mouth in time with the tunes she was pounding out.  I was fascinated by this story as here was a person I could identify with! Humor!

She had a quilting rack hanging from the ceiling of her living room. She would lower it up and down when needed. She bought fabric scraps by the pound from Sears mail order and when she had finished the quilt, she would hang it outside. The mail lady would see it and give her a free newspaper. Suddenly the quilts that my mother had rescued from the cupboard above my grandfather’s shower began to take on more meaning.

I knew that she had been the first postmistress of Arvin, California and that she had submitted the name Arvin herself after Orange was rejected for being overused.  I also heard how she put my grandmother to bed as a young child in Indian Territory and then woke her up the next morning to welcome her to Oklahoma. My grandmother thought they had moved in the night.

I read in Birdie’s letters to her sister, Minnie, how she wept at the memory of the baby she had tried so hard to keep alive by the heat of the fire. They wrote poems to each other for comfort as their mother had lost her first three babes from diphtheria over the course of a week while visiting relatives.

As I heard more about this woman, who I suspect could have taken down the senate but for her timeline in history, I began to see how perhaps I, a tall, sometimes formidable, buxomness woman could draw strength from her unique approach to life. After all, we do share genes.

I took that dining room table and had it refinished. I had them add pedestal legs and make a leaf for it. It turns out that under that stinky varnish was a table made from beautiful fir. Fir is a soft wood, easily scarred, and yet it survived to become a thing of quiet beauty and purpose in my dining room.

I think of her occasionally as I walk by it. I take courage from her through it. I think of my hesitancy to take bold steps in my life. The ease at which I embrace the timidity of my grandmother, Birdie’s daughter. I think about the things Birdie Lulu could have done in her lifetime if she had been born into my generation and I say to her, “You couldn’t, but I can.”