“Grandma, what time’s Dad coming home?”

Grandma looked up from where she sat on the sofa at her grown granddaughter. The TV blared “The Price Is Right.” Grandma didn’t bother to punch down the volume on the remote control. She just started talking.

“Well, your dad’s gone over to Pete Rucker’s house,” Grandma said, looking up past her granddaughter, as if some unknown clock ticked away just on the other side of the ceiling.

“You remember Pete Rucker. He’s the feller whose Daddy went to jail for moonshining back in ’62, or maybe it was ’63. Your granddaddy was a good friend of his back when they went to school. Your granddaddy and Pete Rucker’s daddy, Jess Rucker. That was Pete Rucker’s daddy’s name. Jess.

“That was before Jess ran moonshine though. Your granddaddy never did cotton to drinking. Least not once we’s married. He drank a little when he was younger but he’s never one to run shine or bootleg whiskey. Bet you didn’t know that about your granddaddy. Did ya? You’d never know it. Him as a grown man. He got all that out of his system by early on and was done with it.

“Not like today’s young people. No, young people today stretch their youngness up into their grown-up years. Drink and act the fool on up after they’ve done married and had children. Shoot, lot of them today don’t even get married and start having children until they’re the age your granddaddy and I was when we’s about finished raising ours.

“I don’t see where they find the energy. I’s about worn out by the time I got your daddy raised and your aunts and uncles. I was plum tuckered out, and now you have men who look like granddaddies chasing after their own babies. I don’t see where they find the strength to lift them let alone chase after them. 

“Mark my words they’re gonna need their children to look after them and their kids are only gonna be starting out. They ain’t gonna watch out for their old worn-out mamas and daddies.

“Eunice and I’s talking about that the other day on the telephone. You know, Eunice she’s the one does my hair. You’ve met her before when you’ve taken me to the hair parlor.”

“I remember Eunice, Grandma …”

“She’s having a hard time of it. Bud. Eunice’s husband. He’s in the hospital again. Got the inflamed gout that makes it so he can’t get around the house. His foot’s just about eat up with it. Eunice says he’ll probably lose his big toe before it’s all said and done.

“Bud used to be just about the handsomest man you’d ever seen. We used to go dancing with them. Your granddaddy and me. Bud and Eunice’d really cut the rug. They’d tear a barn dance down. You’d never know it now with him all heavy and about to lose his toe. And Eunice can barely walk from all them years standing up cutting hair all day long. Varicose veins and all.

“Eunice’s been cutting my hair, I guess, since ’54, or ’55, when she opened her first shop. The first one was over there on Rogers Street where the Dairy Queen used to be but it was a Dairy Queen after it was Eunice’s parlor. I don’t know what’s there now. So much has changed. 

“Then Eunice opened her shop on Euclid Drive. She thought about calling it Eunice on Euclid. But she thought people might think she’d taken to being fancy. I told her, Eunice, people expect a beauty parlor to be fancy. But she decided to keep calling it just Eunice’s anyway. Then she was in her house cutting hair for a while. That’s back in the ’70s, I think. It may have been in the late ’60s. Anyway, then she re-opened her shop downtown, and she’s been there ever since.

“Yep, that’s where she is. Why’d you want to know?”

“I didn’t, Grandma.”

On TV, a contestant threatened to squeeze the life out of Drew Carey as she crushed the “Price Is Right” host in a bear hug, screaming at the top of her lungs.

“Goodness,” Grandma said. “She’s bigger than Drew Carey and he’s not exactly tiny. I bet he’s sorer than a kicked dog after these shows.”

“Yep, ummmmm …”

“I’m sorry, honey, what did you ask me again?”

“That’s just it, Grandma. For the life of me, I can’t remember.”

Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times.