She Was My First Real Hero

Grandma Perry

“Grandpa is asleep in his chair. He gets pretty tired…” Grandma Perry letter, January 24, 1974

I still have her blue davenport and chair.

Both have been re-upholstered. Had the chair, where Grandpa took a short, post-lunch nap almost every day, done first. Money was a little tight at the time so I had the upholsterer use the blue velvet. It was still pretty expensive but not like mohair. A few years later when money was less scarce, I was able to rehabilitate the sofa, and this time sprang for the original, navy blue mohair. Same color as the re-worked chair’s velvet but wildly different in look and feel; old school. Just like when we were little kids. Somehow I managed not to have to sell a kidney to pay for it, but not by much. It was important to get the sofa right.

My grandmother knelt and prayed for me and my sisters every night on the arm of that davenport. There were nights when that was the only real hope that I, and maybe my sisters could feel. (I can’t really speak for them.) We might not know where our mother was or if she’d even be coming home that night but we did know that bad as things might seem, someone, somewhere loved us enough to get down on her knees and pray for us, on the arm of that old, blue sofa, before she went to sleep. Every. Single. Night.

We knew because she reassured us each time we got a birthday package or letter from her, we ‘knew’ angels were being sent on the wings of her prayers to keep my sisters and me safe each night.

“Every night when I pray beside the old blue sofa I still ask God to send angels to be by your sides and take care of you. I know He will.” Grandma Perry letter, Oct. 19, 1969

I trusted my grandmother, took her faith in such things, on faith. No one else showed up for us or believed in us the way she did. Her old blue couch was an alter, as holy a place as I, personally had ever experienced. It just had to be right!

Yours truly, standing there, the bright one with the clothespin on his schnoz. Grandma, ever at the ready to help rescue me from my latest learning experience. What can I say? Some of us learn by doing. This is what we tell ourselves. Others learn by not doing what those who learn by doing, do. We all have our roles to play. I’ve always tried to embrace mine.

Essa Phelma (Cobb) Perry was even kinder than she was stubborn, and lordy, that woman was stubborn. She was the only child of charming, Nettie and boyhood shepherd turned cattle wrangler, Newt Cobb: Indian interpreter, cattle-thief-outsmarter, stage coach operator, mercantile owner and reservoir caretaker, in roughly that order, who also just happened to be second cousins with baseball legend, Ty Cobb and fifteen years his senior. According to family legend, Newt got all the charm and kindness, and Ty got that centerfielder’s arm, that lightning swing and nearly all the arrogance and mean.

(BTW: for the life of me, I have no clear idea why all the stories I heard growing up were about Grandma’s beloved, larger than life father, and almost none about her mom. There’s a story there, I’m sure, but it’s one she never told.)

Phelma was, without question, the apple of Newt’s eye, which might sound faintly like some witch’s, spell-casting, formulary, unless you’d ever met her. Demons and witches could all go straight to hell, as God intended. No one ever doubted Phelma’s unflinching faithfulness to Seventh-day Adventist, Christian dogma or her guilessness. And pity any poor, damned fool who tried, just once to outsmart her by quoting the Holy Bible. Phelma had the entire book, King James version, of course, more or less memorized.

As a girl my grandmother rode her surefooted ‘harsss’ (her memorable pronunciation of horse), across the sagebrush prairie and Ponderosa foothills of Central Oregon to a one room schoolhouse in the high desert country near Sisters, daily, studied hard, earned her diploma and eventually went off to nursing school to study the healing arts and earn her nurse’s cap and pin. Then she returned to the place she loved so well to work as a country nurse, an LPN (licensed practical nurse), caring for the sick and infirm, and delivering countless babies over the years, the old fashioned way.

“I’m here now, Fanny and I’m not leavin’ till we’re through this. Boil me up some water, John, and bring me all the spare blankets and towels you’ve got. Then fill the woodbox by the stove and go make yourself useful elsewhere.”

She was a doer, a healer, a teacher, a brilliant, generous cook, a fabulous storyteller and an absolute stranger to complaint. Phelma Cobb had been raised in a hard land that demanded spirit, grit and patience. She was a force of nature who managed to sweep my young grandfather off his feet, utterly capturing his imagination before eventually becoming his wife and lifelong partner; tireless, country, mid-wife/nurse weds brilliant, young civil engineer and builds a rich life with him in Central Oregon.

My grandparents, Aubrey, 22 and Phelma, 19, presumably on their honeymoon. Elk Lake, 1917.

When my dad was high school age my grandmother saved a little ‘pin money’ each month by taking in other people’s laundry to help Dad afford flying lessons, flight time and aviation fuel.

Dad, teenage pilot, then teenage flight instructor.

My Scots grandmother, who gleaned potatoes and mint from farmers’ harvested fields each year to share with friends and folks in need, and feed weekly Sabbath dinner visitors from church, saw absolutely no shame in doing jobs no one else much wanted. She understood from an early age that these things could not and did not make her even the least bit smaller.

Grandma Perry hanging laundry washed in her faithful, old Maytag wringer washer on the back yard clothesline. I can still smell the Clorox and the Mrs. Stewarts Liquid Bluing. That’s Bend Oregon’s Pilot Butte in the far background.

To this day I’m haunted by the time she hand scrubbed out the filthy garbage pail that was one of my after school jobs as a second-grader, a foul, moldy chore which I’d been successfully putting off for a month by the time she and Grandpa arrived in Oklahoma for a two-week visit. None of my pleadings, apologies or hang-dog looks could dissuade her.

It was a teaching moment. My adoration of her and my horror at seeing her methodically scraping and scrubbing rotting potato peels and moldy food scraps, cleaning up my oft shirked and hated task, fundamentally locked something within me into a determined new space. While I pleaded and despaired, she washed and, as was her way, preached.

“It’s important for you to understand while you’re young that you are not too good for any honest task, Davey” she instructed in her kind, immovable voice.

“It will serve you for the rest of your life to learn this lesson now. There will be lots of messes in life as you grow up. If I’m not too good to clean up this stinky mess then you most certainly aren’t too good for it either. Try to remember that. You’ll see. You will spend your whole life working with and around others who tell themselves they are too good to do things they don’t want to do, the smelly, ugly chores. They’re not, of course, but some of them will spend twice the time it would have taken to just roll up their sleeves and get it done, looking for someone else to do it, instead. I want you to be better than that.”

A generation after helping my father, she set aside a bit of ‘pin money’ from her Social Security check each month, placing it into a savings account so that one day she could help me buy my first car, a used, brown ‘73 Ford Pinto that I drove more than a hundred thousand miles.

“…I’m so glad you have your driver’s license,” she wrote, “I want Cindy to get hers too. I sit at home because I can’t drive - and I don’t want you folks to have to, too.”

Oh, how she beamed that first day when I drove up in front of her little, Kearney Street house, in Bend. My grandmother didn’t drive, but she surely did love it when her grandson drove her up to the top of Pilot Butte in the very car she’d saved up for, bit by bit, for years to offer him some of those freedoms she could only long for.

Me and that trusty, ‘73 Pinto that my grandma helped me buy, and my small helper/neice, Shannon, probably somewhere around 1980. Looks like I’m either bleeding the brakes or repacking the wheel bearings. Did all my own maintenance on the Pinto Pony. Drove that car over a hundred thousand miles.

I think about my grandma all the time, even still. Though she passed away maybe forty years ago now, after Erin was born, and before Jenny, she is still here with me in a hundred ways: her drop-leaf kitchen table that sits by the window in my kitchen. Her sacred, blue sofa and chair. Her lifelong entreaties toward kindness and honesty. Her pans of golden, pull-apart dinner rolls and ‘tester’ cookies.

My grandmother probably would never have thought herself, ‘hero’ material.

I do.

Much of what I know about heroes and steadfastness, blackberry picking and jam making, about applesauce and sweet pickles, and canning, and baking …and storytelling I learned first from her.

Essa Phelma Cobb Perry. Grandma Perry. She was my first and kindest hero.