Word of the Day

… courtesy of Merriam Webster, with slight modifications by me:

August 27, 2010
Word of the Day

regale

\rih-GAIL\

DEFINITION

verb
1
: to entertain sumptuously : to feast with delicacies
*2
: to give pleasure or amusement to

FELIX’S EXAMPLE

My grandmother Phyllis used to regale me for hours with comic, informative and sometimes ribald stories of her life and my family’s history.

DID YOU KNOW?

“Regale” has been an English verb since at least 1656; it was adapted from French “régaler,” which has the same meaning as “regale.” The French verb goes back to Middle French “galer,” which means “to have a good time,” and to Old French “gale,” meaning “pleasure.” (“Gala,” meaning “a festive celebration,” is from the same source.) “Regale” also has a history as a noun meaning “a sumptuous feast.” That use dates back to at least 1670, when someone penned the following notice for posterity: “My Lord Duke will not be able to get away yet…, all the regales that are intended for him not being yet at an end.” (The lord referred to is the Duke of Buccleuch, whose regales ended once and for all 15 years later when he was beheaded.)

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

Word of the Day

… courtesy of Merriam Webster, with slight modifications by me:

The Word of the Day for August 28, 2009 is:
chauffeur • \SHOH-fer\ • noun

: a person employed to drive a motor vehicle

Felix’s Example Sentence:

As my grandmother Phyllis aged, a decent concern for her safety, not to mention that of other drivers, prompted my father and me to become her chauffeurs for grocery shopping, trips to the hairdresser, doctor, dentist and other places.

Did you know?

Here’s a hot tip about the origins of today’s word: the first chauffeurs were people employed to stoke a steam engine and keep it running. The literal meaning of the French noun “chauffeur” (from the verb “chauffer,” meaning “to heat”) is “one that heats.” In the early days of automobiles, French speakers extended the word to those who drove the “horseless carriage,” and it eventually developed an extended sense specifically for someone hired to drive other people. It was this latter sense that was borrowed into English in the late 19th century. Incidentally, the French word “chauffeur” derives from the same Anglo-French word that gave English speakers the verb “chafe,” and ultimately can be traced back to the Latin verb “calēre” (“to be warm”).

Great-Grandmother Dance

“Dance” was the name by which her grandchildren and great-grandchildren called my Great-grandmother Rose Jones Lancaster Love.  Dance was the only great-grandparent I recall knowing, I was sixteen when she died. She had married young, nobody knew exactly how young, for the exact year she was born she never revealed. A tiny, stooped little lady who was kind, but nonetheless formidable.

Rose Jones Lancaster Love

She gave us the run of her house when we visited, exacting proper behavior and  requiring picking up after ourselves before we left. The only picture I have of Dance appears here, from perhaps the mid-nineteen forties. Well into her old age she could do embroidery, needle work and made cozies of thread for the cocktail glasses which were brought out for the adults on every visit. I have been told by my parents that one drink was all they got from Dance, but it was invariably robust to the point of lasting throughout dinner.

Dance had no toys for children in her house, but she did have a large poker set complete with several sets of cards, and many poker chips. We busied ourselves with building card houses, stacking chips like trees or bushes grouped around the pasteboard constructions.

When the houses collapsed, we built them again, or played made-up games of cards. Occasionally we might forget ourselves and throw chips at each other, but one piercing look from Dance’s keen and unclouded eyes brought us up short.

The clean-up process was quite educational, as it happened, since the decks of cards had to be grouped into complete decks by suit and color, including the pattern on the backs, which were different for each deck.

Dinner was always formal, sit down with the children at the main table. We were always interested in the buzzer concealed beneath the carpet by Dance’s chair, ready to be pressed to summon Gussie, the cook, from the kitchen with the different courses. We never quite dared to press this buzzer ourselves, though. I don’t think my grandchildren would be similarly deterred.

Dance grew up in the piney woods of southeastern Georgia, near Folkston, close to the Florida line, just to the east of the Okefenokee Swamp. I never knew this until much later in life. Odd to find it out, as the comic strip Pogo was one of my favorites, and I am sure discussions on the comics would have been interesting, although not so much to Dance. Her family had a turpentine business, tapping pine trees for sap, distilling it into turpentine and selling it to various customers. Dance was visiting a school friend in Chattanooga when she met George Dent Lancaster, and in due course married him. Her first child, Marshall, was born in 1898. My grandmother Phyllis was born in 1901. When it came time to record her birth for her tombstone, her second husband, Walter Love and my grandmother computed her likely birth year as 1878. That would have made Dance 83 when she died in 1961. A good old age for someone born in the South under Reconstruction, in depressed times.

George’s story is more detailed, and more lively. I will get to my Great-grandfather in another post.

Granny Phyllis and the “Little Monkey”

My Granny Phyllis was an outspoken product of her generation in the south, who never hesitated to call a spade a goddamn shovel. She shared the racial prejudices of her time, but not the polite language which talked around the subject. Even in the last decade of her life, after all the struggles of the 1960s had settled the de jure question of entrenched prejudice and established the official tolerance she never quite observed.

Following the Civil Rights acts of the middle 60s and the work of many Chattanooga civic leaders of both races, public places of all sorts, including restaurants, were integrated. One day Granny Phyllis was dining alone in the Home Plate Cafeteria when a well-dressed black man asked if he could share her large table. This request raised all her hackles, but she chose strategy over her usual directness. She smiled at the man, and as he seated himself, began to talk non-stop to him, never allowing him a chance to speak, although she peppered him with questions so that he put his fork down and began many times to reply. When she was ready, she gathered her things and left the man with a cooling and untouched meal in front of him. Granny Phyllis loved to tell the story, which she saw as her triumph over a Negro (not the word she habitually used) who didn’t know his place.

I became involved later in her life in a situation that might have blown up rather badly. Granny Phyllis, who refused to give up her driver’s license, had rear-ended a car. The officer investigating ticketed her for following too closely, pointing out the court date. Granny Phyllis was furious. As she told me a number of times over the weeks before the court date, that “little monkey” had not treated her with respect. The officer was black, you see, and regardless of her fault, she took exception to his attitude.

I accompanied my grandmother to city traffic court on the day, fearing the worst if the officer and the accused shared the same space. The proceedings dragged on in the usual way, and I had to make a quick run to feed my meter. When I got back, Granny Phyllis was ready to go. The other motorists had not appeared, since her insurance company had settled with them, and as customary the judge dismissed the ticket. Nothing passed between the “little monkey” and my grandmother. I was relieved.

My grandmother was unfailingly kind to those less fortunate than she…as long as they remembered their place.

Circling around the Truth

For years I have habitually said, in response to some tale of domestic discord, “There are always three versions of a divorce or breakup between a man and a woman: His story, Her story, and, finally, the truth.” Nicely phrased bit of wry humor, I always thought. But now, at the unwinding shank end of my life, I think I was wrong. There are as many versions of any story as there are those not only directly involved, but deeply affected. This is especially true of divorce and its aftermath, particularly when children are involved.

Granny Phyllis Cuts Loose

My grandmother Phyllis was an extraordinary, usually entertaining, often infuriating and always interesting woman. She married my grandfather Felix when she was eighteen and he was twenty-one. It was 1919, the Great War, as people then called it, before another even larger war came along, was over, Spanish Flu was raging, but Phyllis and her mother traveled by Pullman car to New York to shop for a trousseau. Priorities.

Oh, there was one empty trunk going up to be filled with clothes, and another to be filled with liquor. The Volstead Act had passed, but it would not be in full effect until the next year. Prohibition had come to Tennessee almost ten years earlier.

How My Family Survived Prohibition

Alcohol has never been a stranger to my family. The gradual extension of the prohibition of alcohol production in the United States came early in Tennessee. The Volstead Act was voted in to be effective in 1920, following the ratification of the18th amendment in 1919. Tennessee had been dry under state law since 1912.

My various Great-grandparents and grandparents never missed one toddy due to these niggling legalities. In common with their coevals in the business and professional community of the day, each of them had arrangements with bootleggers and whiskey distillers scattered throughout the area, especially in the wooded fastnesses of Walden’s Ridge. Orders would be placed for quantities of corn whiskey, accompanied by charred oak kegs acquired by my family from various sources. The kegs would be returned full of distillate, to be stored in attics and cellars until age and charcoal had transformed the raw moonshine into passable whiskey.

An ironic note to those days furnished my Granny Phyllis with a story she loved to tell. She grew up on Vine Street in the Fort Wood neighborhood of Chattanooga, an upper-middle class area. A block down the street the proprietor of the formerly legal Deep Springs Whiskey Distillery lived in a large, comfortable house. This gentleman simply made other arrangements for continuing his business after Tennessee made whiskey production illegal. As a sidebar to this bit of history, seventy years later the same house was purchased to provide a rectory for the new rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the downtown parish I now attend. The new occupants of this house delighted in its history and made it a point to tell every visitor about their illustrious predecessor. Episcopalians enjoy irony as well as whiskey.

My grandmother had other stories about the nicieties of liquor consumption during these years. My great-grandparents, her in-laws, had a large, three story house on Walnut Street close to Fifth Street, about where one of the many UnumProvident parking lots is now located. Two black employees kept the house running, Andy, a man of all work and sometime chauffeur, and a cook whose name escapes me. My great-grandmother, Tennie, insisted that her husband and any guests drink only in the third floor sitting room she used as a sewing room. Her reason for this rule was fear that the servants would realize that drinking was going on in the house. Tears would run down my grandmother’s face as she told of Tennie’s naïveté. There are no secrets in a house with servants.

Then there was the time my father tried to Save His Parents From Jail. At the age of about nine, my father became aware of the illegality of liquor. He already knew of certain bottles kept in a cabinet deep in his parents’ house. One day, tormented by the fear that his parents would be busted by the revenue agents, Daddy took each bottle out of the cabinet and poured it down the drain. My grandparents were not amused. They installed a lock on the cabinet and my father lived hard for weeks.

Eventually, of course, prohibition was repealed, first at the federal level, then state by state, legalizing whiskey again in Tennessee by 1937. An old gentleman who refinished and touched up furniture in his retirement once told me that repeal was the reason there were no really large white oak trees in Tennessee. As the distilleries started up again, the demand for white oak barrel staves resulted in every sizeable tree in the late thirties being cut down. Ah, the environmental damage from misguided temperance forces trying to ram abstinence down Tennessee throats.

Thankfully, nobody in my family ever felt parched.

Father Sullivan and Great-grandfather George

I missed being Catholic (Roman) by very little. My father was raised Catholic by his mother, Granny Phyllis to me. At the age of thirteen, he was sent by his father (not a Catholic) to the Holy Mountain, Sewanee, to Sewanee Military Academy, now subsumed, like St. Mary’s School for Girls, into St. Andrews, the alma mater of James Agee, Now Let Us Now Praise Famous Men etc.

My father’s time on Sewanee Mountain was marked by the influence of the Chaplain of the Episcopal Church who provided spiritual guidance to students at the various schools. At fifteen, my father wrote his mother to inform her that he wanted to convert to the Episcopal Church. Granny Phyllis responded that she would prefer that he be a committed Episcopalian rather than a reluctant Catholic. So it was done.

Twilight for Granny Phyllis

The last year of my grandmother’s life was spent in a nursing home. Attended by over worked CNAs and RNs, Granny Phyllis raged and quarreled, finding fault with the room, her roommate and the staff; she went wandering in and out of time.

Time became un-tethered from its framework for her, between occasional moments of lucidity. One moment she would casually remark that her mother was in a room on the next floor below, and they had visited that morning. My great-grandmother had died thirty years before. Another moment she would comment caustically on the evening news, showing some awareness of the world outside.

Fegi and Miller

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death

My father was known from his first lisping attempts of speech as “Fegi,” since that was as close as his baby speech powers could come to his given name, “Felix.” My father was the first and last child my grandparents had. A year after Daddy was born, his first cousin Miller Smith, the first son of my Aunt Mimi and Uncle Blackwell, arrived. The next Smith would arrive nine years later, so Fegi and Miller became the next thing to brothers for the rest of their lives.

Constant visits between the two families (both resident in Chattanooga) kept the relationship close, with the two boys frequently sleeping over at one house or the other. I have a set of studio photographs of the two of them over twenty years, from the time when Daddy and Miller were two and one, respectively, until the last picture, in October of 1943, both in uniform, Navy for Daddy and Army for Miller, just before they both went overseas in WWII.