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Dyre
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Commentary by Arnold Dyre
I have previously written of Christmas celebrations and my family’s Christmas traditions in Grenada over the years. Eventually, however, Beverly and I began going to Ripley to visit Beverly’s sister, Rita, her husband David and their son, our nephew, Blake.
Now, we go to Blake’s house in Tupelo but, thankfully, we do not depend on Blake to do the cooking. Rita does most of the cooking although, from time to time, Blake will grill up some mighty fine Christmas steaks!
Somehow, I have lost my name. I used to be called Arnold Douglas. Then it was Arnold until Blake started calling me “Unc” (short for Uncle) and that is now it. Even all of Blake’s friends call me Unc. Beverly is “Aunt Bev,” although, when Blake was very young and could not properly say the “B” sound, Beverly was “Aunt Vev.”
These things and more flood my memory as I think of Christmas. I remember one year Beverly and I headed out for Ripley late one evening with freezing rain beginning to fall in Jackson. By the time we got to Canton, the roads were already really bad. Beverly was telling me to slow down, and I was going down the middle of the road across a bridge when a driver behind me started blowing his horn and, once we cleared the bridge, he went flying past -- giving me a less than friendly gesture in the passing. When we reached the next bridge, we observed that the fellow in such an all fired hurry had spun off the road. He appeared no worse the wear, and I gave him a friendly wave as I slowly passed.
By the time we got to Grenada, it was snowing hard. The interstate was really a mess, and I decided to take Highway 7 to Oxford. We had a car load of presents and our cat Jeeju in the car with us. The car’s defrost was not getting the job done, and Beverly insisted on turning up the heat, claiming that would help. I got so hot that I had to crack the window on the driver’s side, and poor little Jeeju got in my lap and stuck her nose up to the crack to take in fresh air. Finally, I got so hot that I stripped off my shirt!
We made it as far as Water Valley when I decided that we had to do something to get some of the ice and snow off the windshield. I had heard that you could pour Coca-Cola on a frozen windshield, so I stopped at that lone service station out on the Water Valley bypass and went in to purchase a Coke. I walked in the place stripped down to an old man’s sleeveless undershirt; the surprised folks huddled around a heater inside exclaimed, “Man, don’t you know it’s snowing?”
I replied, “I’m burning up. Give me a Coca-Cola!”
The Coke on the windshield worked pretty good. The device used to clean windshields at the service station was frozen to its bucket, so I used one of my shoes as a scrapper. I had to stop several times along the way to work at it with my shoe. I remember that we stopped at a little place near daylight, and I could see nothing but white. It took us all night long to make it to Ripley.
Blake was waiting for us in the driveway when we got there! His first words were, “Unc, what happened to your shirt?”
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