Who Do You Think You Are? An Occasional Series

OK, so Lisa Kudrow apparently has this great new geneaology program on NBC called "Who Do You Think You Are?" I have never seen an episode of Friends, but I respect Lisa Kudrow's integrity if only for this exchange from Romy and Michele's High School Reunion:

Michele: I'm the Mary, and you're the Rhoda.
Romy: YOU'RE the Rhoda, you're the Jewish one.

But I digress. If the people in my family were this program's executive producers, this show would be titled "Who the Hell Are You?" The blessing or curse of growing up in my small town in the 1970s was that if you didn't know who you were, someone would tell you in exquisite, tortured detail. Since the griots of my home town no longer stride the earth, Meta Cranky feels obliged to provide Crankies #1 and #2 with a genealogical primer. Let's begin with granny ladies, shall we?
Hazel was always the Mary, never the Rhoda. Here, she's standing in front of her cellar door in celebration of her flower garden, although b&w pics don't do her zinnias justice. Here are some random factoids for Crankies 1 & 2 to know about their great-grandmother:

She had that braided hair thing going long before Yulia Tymoshenko wowed the Ukrainians with her traditional up-do. I don't know how the prime minister keeps her hair in place, but my granny used armies of hair pins. Here's a bit of Amusing Family Lore that requires you to know: 1) Granny had braids, she was short, and she could talk until the earth was flat and; 2) My cousin Tim was 6 feet tall and change. When my granny began a story that promised to be the length of Paradise Lost, Tim would look down on her braided crown and begin plucking out hairpins. Her fierce concentration allowed her to hold forth until all the pins were gone and the braids hung, unfettered, down her back.
Since her ears weren't pierced, she wore devices she called "ear screws" that probably are banned in Scandinavian countries. She never left the house without them. She always looked really good, which was a testimony to genetic material that gave her The Good Hair and some serious bone structure. She also looked good, though, because she decided it was important, and she went to the trouble to apply lipstick and abuse her ears to make it happen. Not to bore small crankies with tales of economic hardship or anything, but let's just say that Hazel didn't always have a lot to work with.

The photo at the top of this entry was taken when Meta Cranky's dad returned from the war in about 1944, and it's always, for her, been a Dad picture. There's a different story going on, though, when you look at the faces of his nuclear family.

OK, you're loving it that Cranky Girl's dad, granddad, and auntie all have identical dimples in their chins, right? Is that a great trick or what? But now look at Hazel. Her face says pretty much, "they haven't licked us yet."

By the time I knew her, Hazel had settled into a matronly comfort that allowed her to monopolize conversations and confidently tell people how to breathe in and out. She could effortlessly deflate egos with this killer phrase: "pretty is as pretty does." Yet her face in this homecoming picture is all about adversity and endurance: there in those contracted eyebrows you can see her uncertain finances and the worry of a double blue star mother. She was opinionated and prejudiced, utterly competent, and tireless in accomplishing the hard physical labor that kept a poor family from being a trashy family. She cried only on Mondays, wash day, because she could weep while she wrung out laundry alone in a wash house.

She earned the right to be the Mary.
--MCG