A lot of people over the years have asked me how it is I turned out to be very successful and a good person and all this stuff, and the main answer is this person right here.
My Nana.
This is my Nana. She would be 112 years old today. And she was a nurse, and she was head of nursing at a hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas.
She desegregated that hospital pretty much by herself back when they used to have a ward for white patients and a word for black patients.
One night she said there were just too many patients and she told her nurses:
"Fuck it, just put everybody in beds. I don't care. I don't want this segregation anymore."
So everybody desegregated that hospital that night. And then after that, the NAACP came to her and said something like:
We heard you desegregated this hospital and we're in the works with the Eisenhower Administration, or whoever, to desegregate the schools. And we wanted to ask you how you did this desegregation of this hospital.
Nana said:
I just did it and there was no blowback.
Well she probably didn't use the word blowback but whatever word was like blowback then.
So she couldn't be much help to the NAACP but she tried.
This is how amazing my grandmother was:
She was born 112 years ago. She had polio. She beat it with the help of her family who put hot rags around her legs constantly, because that's how you had to cure polio. I think they still do this. They put hot rags around your legs to straighten your legs or whatever.
After that, she grew up on a farm with 9 or 10 kids. She had to do all the farm stuff. Then she became a nurse and lived through World War II, and the Great Depression, and she saw the moon landing, and she saw computers, and she saw all this stuff happen in her lifetime.
But to me, I always think about Nana as having raised me, because my mother and my father took off. They didn't want to raise me. So they left when I was 4 years old, and again in the fourth grade, and then again a couple of years later.
I didn't see my dad for most of my entire childhood.
I didn't see my mother for more than half of my childhood.
But my Nana was there. She's the one who raised me along with my brother and sister.
Anyway, I want to talk about Nana because today would be her 112th birthday, and I'm sure she'd be very happy she's not here for it. She'd be very upset with Republicans.
Let me tell you something. She did not like Republicans. She would go:
Ohhh those Republicans, they're stinkers. They ought to be ashamed of themselves.
That's how she talked.
I would get home from school and we would watch the news together. And back then, Reagan was the president, and there was all this talk at the beginning of the Reagan years that he was going to get rid of Social Security for people like her who had put money into Social Security her whole life. Reagan thought Social Security was communism.
Anyway, she hated Reagan, and she hated Republicans.
She wasn't a very religious person but she would walk around the house humming all the time and I couldn't tell if she was humming hymns or something.
I knew she had a religion but she kept it to herself. She wouldn't want to talk anybody out of religion because she wasn't that person either.
My sister and I talk about Nanaisms, and one of the Nanaisms I remember the most is that she would go:
Everybody's entitled to their own stupid opinion.
Nana was not happy with my parents. Occasionally, we would be eating Cheetos and watching some movie together, and she would turn to me and go:
Douglas, do not turn out like your mother. Or: Douglas, do not turn out like your father.
Since she was a farm girl, she was always cooking farm food. So I woke up almost every single day of my high school years, I would be lying there, and I would wake up with a plate of food under my nose. Under my nose every morning. I would wake up to the smell of eggs and bacon and toast. Every single day. And I would go: Arg, arg, arg, and eat it.
And then Nana would go:
Douglas, get up and get out of bed and go to school and make something out of your life and be a productive member of society.
She was like a motivational speaker on top of everything else.
There was this other Nanaism where she would go:
Idle hands are the devil's workshop.
She was always trying to get people to do stuff. Like: Get up and go do stuff.
But the other thing is that Nana was a fun person too. She had no respect for televangelists, and every now and then we would be sitting at the table or in the living room, and she would walk up to us, and then she would put a palm of her hand on our forehead and then she'd gently push our forehead.
And then she would very quietly, like a televangelist, go:
You are healed.
And she would throw her head back when she'd go, "you are healed." All dramatic-like.
I was talking to my sister last night about the time I bought, for Nana's birthday, a Chippendales calendar. It was a calendar with all these naked men. Nana opened it up and she laughed so hard that she had to hold her dentures in. She always had these dentures, and she was always taking them out and putting them in, and taking them out and putting them in.
When she was older, she was walking around on these old polio legs that barely worked. She had two hearing aids. She went through a lot. She survived heart attacks and heart failure and all this stuff.
She would also do this thing we would get a kick out of where Nana would sometimes just be walking through the house and she would say this phrase from this old movie or song and it went:
What can you do with a drunken sailor?
And I think, since she was a nurse, she probably met quite a few drunken sailors in her day. I hope she had a fun life with sailors!
And then she would say all these other fun things like:
Ohhh it's colder than a well-diggers behind!
My sister says every time I quote Nana I go:
Ohhh!
But that's because she always said "Ohhh!" Like she would go:
Ohhh, it's time for lunch!
I very frequently talk about my Nana being my Obi-Wan Kenobi because everywhere I go, there she is.
She supported me all the time. My mom and dad never came to see me play violin in high school, even though I was an all-state violinist. I know you think all-state is just for sports but I was an all-state violinist. I got a scholarship, like I say all the time.
And my mom and dad never came to see me.
But my grandmother, with her polio legs, came to see me. This one time, she walked with me uphill for one mile, just like an apocryphal story but true, she came up to the high school and she watched me play first chair, first violin. She got the whole experience.
And she was so proud of me.
A few weeks after Nana died, I was sleeping, and then I woke up in the middle of the night, and I sat up, and I looked at the end of the bed, and there was Nana.
It was her face and then her body was more like a shell. It was this beautiful cream shell instead of a human body. And I looked at her. She didn't say anything. But I could hear her with her mind saying:
Everything's going to be all right.
Whether you believe she was a ghost, or whether you believe that was part of my psyche that night, that part doesn't matter.
What matters is:
Someone loved me that much that she saved my life.
So sometimes when I'm talking to friends of mine who are parents and they are upset because they haven't accomplished something in life, or they haven't done enough this, or enough that, but I know they're good parents, I always say:
Look, the important thing is you're a good parent and you're good at raising children.
I'm not here to talk about abortion or any other political issue.
I'm talking about people who are already alive in front of you: love them.
And make sure they know that you love them.
Don't be a welcome mat, and don't let them walk all over you.
But if you're going to have children, or if you're raising grandchildren, whoever you're raising, just do it the way you know you're supposed to.
Like Nana did.
Nana knew how to raise me and she raised me the right way.
Happy birthday Nana, I love you.
And I love you. I hope you're having the best Nana birthday you could possibly have.
