10:19pm December 28, 2014

Henryisms — and some family history.

My father had a lot of strange sayings, that he picked up from his dad, Henry. A few months ago I had him send me a list of them. Here are some of them (I heard a lot of these growing up):

You’re a pretty good kid for the shape you’re in…
…But Lord what a shape.

As cute as a little speckled pup with a ring around it’s tail.

I chased her and chased her until she finally caught me. (Based, as far as we know, on a Choctaw wedding tradition.)

Duba this and Duba that
Duba killed a yellow cat.
(Usually sang while working)

You’re as welcome as the flowers in the springtime

I’m just as fine as frog fur!

Why don’t you sit down before you fall down and break something. (An invitation to guests)

She has freckles on her butt..she’s pretty.

He’s as sharp as a tack….and twice as flat headed.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this window into my family’s weirdness. :-)

I asked my dad about another saying that I picked up somewhere along the line, “Scarce as hen’s teeth,” and he confirmed that came through his father as well.

Behind the cut is a lot of family history that you may or may not be interested in.

I never knew Henry Baggs. My brothers both described him as a cool grandfather. It would be nice to have had a cool grandfather. My other grandfather molested me and tried to molest my cousin, and that was actually the least of the cruelty he could come up with. My memories of him are very strange, because he would walk me to the fish hatchery, show me around, teach me to skip rocks in the creek, and then either tell dirty stories or fondle my breasts or something. Henry had his problems too (who doesn’t), but from what I’ve heard, he was nowhere near even approaching as disturbing as my other grandfather. Although my creepy grandfather started mellowing out when he was dying – maybe he realized he’d have to answer to himself, or to his God, for the things he’d done, because he apologized for things none of us ever expected an apology for, among other things.

Anyway, Henry had one chance to meet me. I was a baby and they were headed in our general direction. My parents invited them to stay, but they didn’t. And soon my grandfather died suddenly and quite young, with heart problems. A common way for men on that side of the family to die, between the ages of 45 and 60, roughly. I’m actually pleasantly surprised that my father had as long a life as he had, because I was taught he would probably die by his sixties. He lived to just a few weeks shy of 73: He felt that my birthday and my mom’s birthday were worth sticking around for, but his own birthday wasn’t worth the strain. There’s a period where you have some control over whether you can fight to stay alive or give in and die, and he fought to stay alive for me and my mother so we wouldn’t have bad memories of our birthdays, but after that I think it was a combination of running out of energy to keep going, and lack of further motivation. He was clearly not doing well the last few times I saw him, and I knew he wouldn’t be around much longer. Especially when I kept seeing parts of his face turn blue, and an invisible light would shine through his skin when that happened.

Anyway, Henry had that one chance to meet me, and he never did. My father said it was the only thing about his father that he didn’t think he could ever forgive. His father did a lot of things that required forgiving if you were going to get along with him. But never meeting me was something else.

It probably wasn’t my grandfather who made that choice, though. In my family, it seems like in each pair of grandparents there’s the relatively nice one and the mean one. My mom’s dad and my dad’s mom were the mean ones. My dad’s mom once made us sleep in someone else’s trailer at a family reunion because we told her I’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia and she was afraid someone would catch my crazy cooties. She wouldn’t allow me near children unsupervised even though i was still a child myself. She did things like calling my father on his birthday, early in the morning, and immediately launching into a rant about how heartless he was for not contacting her (in his sleep???) on his birthday. Finally he said, “It’s my birthday, I don’t have to take this shit” and hung up on her. But he was definitely the black sheep of the family as far as his mom was concerned. I think a lot of it was an autism thing, she thought he was heartless, she thought I was heartless, and she hated my whole family. So I can see her persuading my grandfather not to come and visit us.

Henry was one of the people who actually went through the Okie migration. He was a boy at the time, and because they’d stuffed the seats and the top of the car so full of their belongings, he and his brother had to ride on the running board on the side of the car. All the way from Oklahoma to California, at a very slow speed. Cars back then weren’t very fast anyway, and this one was loaded down, plus they were worried about harming the kids if they went too fast. So they had the mattress tied to the roof of the car with assorted odds and ends, the rest of their belongings inside the car, and the kids riding on the outside of the car. They got the car as a trade-off for part of their farm when they sold it – the buyer couldn’t afford the full price of the land, so he threw his car in as part of the deal.

Anyway, hope the family history was useful or interesting to someone, at any rate.