Number-Two Fan
My paternal grandmother’s name was Marguerite (my grandfather called her Margaret, but that’s another story, and I won’t digress). She passed away twenty years ago at the age of eighty-two, so she’d be one hundred and two were she still alive today. Grandma was my number-two fan. That was ok, since Grandpa, her husband of so many decades (his nickname was Shiny, by the way), was definitely my number-one fan. To say that they were great grandparents is an understatement. Grandma has been on my mind a lot lately, and since it’s Mother’s Day as I write this, it seems like a fitting time to reminisce via the keyboard a bit.
I had lots of sleepovers with them when I was young. I was an only child, and for the first five years of my life I was the only grandchild. We had a routine, and it worked out for all of us. I stayed at their house for a night or two most weekends, and they spoiled me. It was that simple.
Grandma didn’t drive, but that was okay since she lived within walking distance of pretty much everything we could possibly need. There was Standard Drug Store less than a block from their house, and we walked there just about every day to pick up some necessity or another (like a candy bar or some new crayons). Every day Grandma bought a book. And by book, I mean a paperback romance novel. She read a new book every day, cover to cover. She loved to read; it was her thing. She would choose her books by the cover; she loved the pictures on the covers. But, as I’ve come to know so well recently, sometimes authors (or publishers) CHANGE those covers. I remember so many times when I’d be watching a cartoon and eating Spaghetti O’s when Grandma would put down her book and exclaim that it had happened again. She’d bought a book that morning, started reading in, and realized a few pages in that she’d already read the darned thing. They’d changed the cover on her again! Eventually she began to carry a little notebook with her to the Standard with a list of all the titles she’d read so she could avoid that mishap in the future.
Book covers remind me of Grandma.
About six months ago I published my first book. I was certainly full of ‘piss and vinegar’ (is this only a southern saying, because I’m from Virginia, you know), and I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I designed my book cover, and boy was I proud of it. If you read my last blog, then you’ll know how that ended. If you didn’t read my last bog (WTH?), then I’ll just give you the quick replay—my book needed, and got, a new, professionally redesigned cover. And I thought of Grandma and of her little notebook with the names of the books she had read written inside so that she could be sure not to buy duplicates of the same book with different covers.
Although my book isn’t in her preferred genre, I wish I could show it to her to see what had to say about the new cover. I’m pretty sure When He Was Anna would never be written in her little notebook, because she’d buy a new copy no matter how many times the cover changed. After all, she knew a good book cover when she saw one!