Morning Coffee Interrupted
Nanny enjoying her morning coffee & cigarette while sitting on the dog house in her backyard.
Now that I’m a Nana, I realize that my maternal grandmother’s specter-like movements around the house in the early mornings were not acts of kindness toward me. She wasn’t keeping extra quiet so I could sleep longer—no, she was trying to keep me asleep and out of her hair for as long as humanly possible.
Nanny woke early, smoked (yes, even nurses smoked in the ’60s), drank strong black coffee brewed over a gas flame in an old-school percolator, and watched birds eating from the feeder that hung from the silver maple tree outside her kitchen window. This was her morning ritual, and we knew better than to interrupt it. So, if the gurgling of the percolator woke me unusually early, I wisely stayed in bed, enjoying the crisp sheets a little longer. I’d close my eyes and slide my legs around under the starched cotton until I found a cool spot. Strange questions often floated into my mind in that half-slumber, like, “Why does Nanny only buy white sheets?”
One summer morning, though, I woke to a completely different scene. My Nanny was perched atop the headboard, loudly urging me to join her.
Puzzled but silent, I climbed up onto the headboard, which spanned the width of the bed and had built-in bookshelves. Though not designed to hold a standing adult and child, it proved sturdy enough. Once settled, I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and looked at her. She seemed… not entirely awake. “She must still be dreaming,” I thought. When I finally asked what was going on, all she did was point across the room and say one alarming word: “Rabies!”
I knew the movie Old Yeller, so I understood the seriousness of rabies. I looked where she pointed but saw nothing.
A quick glance told me she had been awake for a while—her hair was combed, glasses on, and the smell of coffee lingered. Finally, she explained: she had just begun heating her second cup of coffee when she heard a loud bang. Thinking I had fallen out of bed, she opened my bedroom door to check. As it swung open, her big, extra-fluffy tomcat came flipping violently across the floor, foam dripping from his mouth. When he rolled head-over-tail under the bed, she bolted across the room, jumped onto the headboard, and woke me.
As she spoke, the cat reappeared—still flipping—rolling out from under the bed. He leapt onto the mattress, sprayed the white sheets with dark yellow urine, then jumped off, banging his head into the wall. Nanny snatched me up piggyback-style, fearing he might join us on the headboard. Clinging to her, I surveyed the mess on the bed and thought again, “Why does Nanny only buy white sheets?”
Just then, the cat flipped into a clothes basket. Nanny quickly set me down, grabbed a bedsheet, and—throwing it over the basket—cleared our path to the door. She began slamming the door shut before we’d even cleared the jamb. With the “rabid” cat secured, she lit a cigarette with trembling fingers over the flame of the boiling coffee pot and burst into tears. She wasn’t a crier, so I nervously asked her, “Why do you only buy white sheets?”
My grandfather, Papaw, had already left for work, leaving us alone in the house. Nanny wasn’t about to re-enter that bedroom, so she called her brother Billy Ray for help. He arrived with a shotgun, ready to “sort it out.” There was shouting, the sound of furniture scraping, the occasional growl… but no gunshot. Then the bedroom door flew open and the cat bolted out. Nanny nearly had a stroke thinking he’d escaped, and somehow I ended up standing on the kitchen counter with her beside me.
Uncle Billy Ray strolled in, chuckling as he unloaded the shotgun. He explained that the old tomcat had somehow gotten his flea collar into his mouth like a horse’s bit, and he’d been flipping around trying to get it out. Once the collar was removed, he was perfectly fine. We all laughed until Nanny cried again.
On his way out, Billy Ray glanced over his shoulder with a twinkle in his eye and said, “I thought all your sheets were white…”
It’s awfully easy to judge people—or cats—by appearances or actions when usually all they really need is our understanding and help.
