My grandmother would be 100 years old today.
She was one of those grandmothers you owe your natural life to. She took me and my sisters in when our mother went into hospital for damn near a year and again a few years later when she died. She ran a little Gulf Coast cafe and worked herself into exhaustion in her uniform and mashed down nurse's shoes while my grandfather, a drinking man who was widely adored, made the rounds. She was a quarter Choctaw and looked it, though she was a bottle blonde as long as she lived. Although she was kind of shy and businesslike, once she got comfortable with you she had one of the most wicked senses of humor I've ever known. The only time I ever saw her cry, and this was a women who'd seen some things, was when her favorite doctor on her favorite soap opera died. She was so embarrassed she nearly died herself. I think she had a crush.
Grandmother whistled under her breath all the time, some tuneless thing that just seemed like an accompaniment to her bustle. She was frugal out of necessity but had a weakness for American Legion bingo. Took me years to realize that when she took those breaks she was going back to play the illegal slots. Every now and then she won a little and you'd have thought hundred dollars was a million. Because she was poor, poor, poor. But damn, she was a woman. I miss her like hell, some thirty years after she's gone.
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Thank you for making her live in our minds too...
I appreciate your kind words. Not bad for a nearly-70-year-old lady! 
