Ha! Five cents!!

Lucy#1 grew up in a very small town in the South, in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Her parents were farming stock from Georgia who moved to Florida to find work during the Great Depression. They were intelligent but not well educated (I don’t think either of my grandparents stayed in school past the sixth or eighth grade), poor but hard-working. As one might expect, Lucy#1 and her siblings were quite intelligent and their parents were determined they would finish high school, which, at the time, was all the education most folks had or needed.

Lucy#1 and all her siblings did well in school; all graduated and went on to successful lives. Lucy#1 joined the Air Force at age 19, which set her on the road for a unique life of experience and travel both in the United States and overseas.

The two things Lucy#1 believed held her back or made her stand out – and not in a good way – were the poor grammar she learned at home as a child and her Southern accent. She told the story of being a first-grader and having her teacher correct her grammar. Lucy#1, always fiercely competitive and determined to be the smartest and the best, was humiliated to be corrected. She wanted to quit school right then. Her daddy explained why she needed to stay in first grade, she took his lecture to heart, and willingly learned proper grammar.

When Lucy#1 was stationed in Massachusetts shortly after she joined the Air Force, she found that people could identify her Southern roots as soon as she spoke. That did not appeal to Lucy#1, so she remade her speech patterns and accent into the most neutral of neutrals.

The joke around the house was that my sister and I were, upon arrival in the world from the womb, immediately informed of two things: we would go to college, and we would speak properly with no trace of accent. Period. These items were non-negotiable as far as Lucy#1 was concerned.

I was a trial to poor Lucy#1 because I was a natural mimic and I altered my speech to match my favorite people. We visited family where I loved my whiney, drawling, good-grammar-eschewing cousin and I came home with a whiney Texas drawl and tried out, “ain’t”. We visited family where another cousin had a funny laugh and I adopted her laugh and her pronounced Florida twang. After any trip, It would take Lucy#1 a couple weeks to re-shape my neutral accent and divest my vocabulary of undesired words and phrases.

I’m not sure what drove her to it, but when I was in junior high school, Lucy#1 found the perfect way to make us toe the grammar line. She covered a baking-powder can with blue paper, wrote “Good Grammar Fund” on it in black marker, and began to charge us five cents for each infraction. My father had some ingrained grammar “issues” and he also (rather gamely, I think, given that he was probably 40 years old and was the source of most the money we all paid) paid up for poor grammar. However, fair was fair, and since Lucy#1 was the only one in the family who cussed, she had to pay for bad words, and her payment was higher – she had to pay a quarter for every curse word.

Imagine the look on any friend’s face when she ate supper at our house for the first time, and family members interrupted the conversation with, “Ha! Five cents, please!” That ejaculation was sometimes followed by a lively discussion of the finer points of spoken English before we returned to the original conversation. My friends thought the whole Lucy family was nuts, but the competitive ones got into the spirit of it and joined in. My sister and I saw nothing unusual in the situation, and not only honed our grammar skills, but collected a lot of money for the fund as a result of Lucy#1 becoming annoyed and saying “s—t!”

Collecting 25 cents from her for swear words was nice, but the most fun was when we could catch Lucy#1 in a grammatical error. Those catches were rare, but we did occasionally snare her on some lazy phrase. Woo hoo! Party time!

Almost everyone whom I’ve told about the Good Grammar Fund has thought it was hilarious. A few friends thought the Fund bordered on child abuse. I will defend the Good Grammar Fund forever as a great idea. My sister and I both sailed through school and still sail through life, easily writing everything from essays and research papers to business letters and thank-you notes. Neither of us is daunted by the English language, whether spoken or written. We come across well in person and on paper.

I’m not saying we speak and write perfectly (certainly everyone who has read anything I’ve written can attest to the fact that I have little understanding of the correct use of commas and way overuse slang and parentheses, among other failings) but our grammar is still good after all these years. Colene has even kept her neutral accent intact. I love a good Southern drawl and can put one on when I feel the need (as when I’m talking to a drawling policeman who probably is going to write me a ticket). My natural drawl shows up when I’m very tired (which was a source of amusement to my coworkers when I lived in northern Illinois), turning “tired” into “taaard”. I can’t remember the last time I pronounced the “g” at the end of a word – I’m always “runnin’ here” and “goin’ there” and “fixin’ to do somethin’ else”.

But the Good Grammar Fund bonded our family. It gave us an endless number of things to debate, countless hours of laughter, and sometimes made our suppertime conversation even more raucous than normal. In the end, while we were teasing each other and listening for mistakes, the Good Grammar Fund kept us from the lazy speech habits that could have kept us from good jobs and good first impressions.

I saw a saying on Pinterest: Never underestimate the seductive power of a good vocabulary.

I would add to that, “. . . or good grammar.”

Thanks, Lucy#1!!

Six years old and chewing tobacco!

I haven’t written anything in a very long time because I have been sad and missing Lucy#1. Now, though, I am at the point where it will make me happy to write about her.  Next up -- some stories from the vaults (vaults of my memory, that is). Some of these stories have been famous in our family for as long as I can remember. 

This story has always cracked me up. Picture a small-for-her-age, tow-headed little girl in this one.

We all know Lucy#1 smoked for many years. What is not common knowledge is that she had her first experience with tobacco the summer she was six years old.

Lucy#1 had a brother four years older than she, and as is typical, Lucy#1 always wanted to do everything her brother did. Her brother (at 10 years old!) sometimes would “borrow” a plug off their daddy’s tobacco and chew it. Lucy#1 talked him out of a “chew” one day. He gave it to her with the understanding that if she told anyone where she got it, he would beat her up.

It happens that Lucy#1 was playing on stilts that day. She was walking around the yard and enjoying her chew until she got distracted with her stilt-walking and instead of spitting out the tobacco juice, she swallowed it!

Naturally, after swallowing the tobacco juice, Lucy#1 ended up leaning against the house (still on her stilts), and lost her breakfast, as well as anything that may have been left from any meal the previous day or previous week. She retched and retched, so violently, so much, and loudly that her babysitter came out to check on her.

When queried, all she would tell the babysitter was that she didn’t feel well, so she ended up spending the rest of the day in bed being pampered and treated for an upset tummy.

Her brother made fun of her for swallowing the juice, washed his hands of the whole thing, and never gave her any more tobacco to chew.

As an aside, Lucy#1 was extremely athletic and could do any physical activity. She was small, but she could play all sports very well and could hula-hoop, jump on a pogo stick, walk on stilts, etc. She put all my friends to shame playing basketball when I was in junior high and high school, and I would have flunked every sport in P.E. without her constant tutoring. She was amazing!! I have never understood how I can look just like her, yet have absolutely zero natural physical ability.