My grandmother was the sort of old lady who had a cadre of friends,
old ladies who became part of my extended family, a loose, warm network of love
at a time when my own immediate family was crumbling. Each of them has long
since departed, but I can still see their faces and hear their voices as though
I had just walked out the door after a visit to grab up my Schwinn and pedal
home.
My favorite old lady was Dorothy Thomas. Dorothy was my
grandmother’s best friend. They travelled together, which says something about
Dorothy already, because my grandmother could be pretty much impossible under
the stress of travelling. Dorothy was the kind of person who took a lot of
pictures on her trips, and then invited all her friends over for a slide show
when she got home. She had this projector with a slide carousel. I loved
Dorothy, but I hated the slides, mostly because they were bad pictures of cool places I’d
never been, our family vacations consisting exclusively of visits to the family farm
in Oklahoma.
Dorothy lived in an enormous (to me) old house. Two stories,
big trees, endless rooms, even servant’s quarters off the kitchen. She’d inherited
it from some relative; retired librarians don’t generally own mansions. I loved
her house. It was so different from all the tidy little one-story brick houses
we’d always lived in. She had Sub-Zero appliances in the kitchen, and the
freezer was always full of ice cream. Upstairs was a no-man’s land; rooms that
no one ever went into, probably stuffed full of junk.
Dorothy always named her car, and it was always some big
square ugly American car of a particularly vile color which she probably
bought cheap and used. When her car was feeling cranky about starting, she
would call it by name and give it a little pep talk. She also tended to rescue
cats. But she always found them homes, so she wasn’t one of those people with
dozens of cats underfoot. I really admire that, because I can NEVER talk anyone
into taking a stray animal. In my experience, once you rescue a cat, it’s yours
forever. Obviously I’m not a good salesperson.
Kids from all over the neighborhood gravitated towards
Dorothy’s house. She never married or had kids of her own, but she had a way of
relating to kids because she still was one at heart. There was always a jigsaw
puzzle going on a card table in the living room, interesting paperback books to
read, treats to eat, an enormous magnolia with branches sticking out straight
like the spokes of a wheel in the backyard, perfect for climbing, and a kitten
somewhere. The kids just found her.
When I was about 10, my sister, my grandmother, Dorothy and I
set out in Dorothy’s big green car for Colorado, ultimate destination – my cousin’s
cabin in Alma. One of the best moments of the trip was when Dorothy spied a
bluebird on a fence rail somewhere in western Colorado. She slammed on the
brakes and pulled over to the shoulder. Other cars were streaming past so she
had to wait for them to clear. She pulled out a map and studied it seriously.
“We are now going to look at the map like very indecisive
Texans,” she intoned piously. After the cars cleared, she put it in reverse and
went back to look at the bluebird.
“We are now going to go backwards like very decisive
Texans,” she added cheerfully.
Somewhere in a hotel room in Colorado, my grandmother kind
of lost it. She was one of those people who was calm, cool, and collected until
suddenly she wasn’t. One little aggravation too many got to her and she went on
a crying jag, lying on one of the hotel beds and sobbing. Dorothy was unfazed,
just sat next to her, rubbing her shoulder gently and cooing softly to her
until she calmed down. To me that was just grandmother being the way she was,
but my sister, who had more rigid views about normal, was pretty freaked out by
the whole thing.
Dorothy didn’t outlive my grandmother. When I was 18, I left
home to join the Army, and I never saw her again. I sometimes wonder what
happened to her magnificent old house in Denton, if the magnolia is still
there, if there’s still Blue Bell in that freezer. I hope so.
Turns out there’s a scholarship at the University of Texas
Department of Library and Information Sciences named after Dorothy. It’s nice
to know that somebody besides me remembers her.
