Nellie was as nervous as a ferret with a big head. She lived in a town of 364, where she owned a two-story house painted white with black shutters. Her yard was full of tulips in the spring, and giant mounds of cigarette butts beneath the kitchen window, perennially.
It had been six months since Grandpa Ned had been run over by a steamroller in a freak construction accident, and she was feeling cooped up in the house. The memories of Ned wafted through the house like Thanksgiving dinner and the smell of the lead pipes in the bathroom. So she decided on a Tuesday morning, while listening to the sow report on the local radio station, that it was time to follow her dreams. So she packed her suitcase, changed the oil in the Buick, and invited us to hit the road with her on a summer trip to Worlds of Fun amusement park. We left on the 8th of August 1972, Nellie driving, with my Mother shotgun and my sister and I playing astronauts in the back seat, our feet partially obstructing grannies keen reward eye.
Grandma Nellie was a speed freak, and the ride to St. Louis was interjected with impromptu highway runs with Oldsmobiles. She had hated Oldsmobiles since she got walked by a 442 in the Fall of 1967. It seemed like no attempt at distraction could keep her right foot from planting in the deep pile carpet when she saw one. Her vertically fissured lips would wrap tight around her Winston, which would lift skyward like Bernstein's baton after a long night of Vermouth. My mother would plead, 'Nellie. There are children in the back", and after a few seconds at redline, she would slow, breaking the tension with a comment about the humidity. After eight hours of this, Mom had enough, and wrestled the reigns from her as we stopped for Ethyl.
Straight.
As my sister and I peered out the back window, straining to see through the crack of the open trunk, we saw Nellie take two swigs from a bottle of Jack Daniels, light up a heater, and wrap the bottle in her flannel pajamas which was stowed away for the remainder of the trip. Nellie snored with her head against the passenger window until we arrived at the Holiday Inn, and after riding with us on the 'Hell on Wheels' rollercoaster for the better half of the next day, her arms flailing in the Missouri sky, she could finally rest.
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My mum’s middle name was Nellie.