“Gone to Carolina in my mind. In my mind I’ve gone to Carolina. Can’t you just see the sunshine, can’t you just feel the moonshine?”
–James Taylor, 1958
Cracked Up
My mother’s mother told her in their phone call from Greenville, SC, to Oakland, CA, in late 1943 around Christmas time: “No grandson of mine should be born outside of the South.” Growing up we called my grandmother Poo, perhaps from a favorite childhood book about Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too. I was never surprised by this story of a phone call between mother and daughter, told to me when I was old enough to remember it, for Poo was not a woman to be trifled with when she made up her mind to do or say something.
Once I was sitting in my 3rd grade class at North Elementary, Anderson, South Carolina, after we had moved there from Greenville for my father’s work at Woodside Mills. The door opens to the class and Poo pops in unannounced and tells the teacher that I am to come with her at this minute. Not waiting for the teacher’s approval, I hop out of my seat and sprint to the door. And off we go down the hallway out to the street to get in my grandmother’s black Cadillac. She’s there to take me to lunch and some shopping before taking me home. That was it. No emergency, no accident in the family. Just an outing with her grandson.
So my mother, Adair Manning Tedards, wasn’t about to ignore her mother’s “orders” any more than I would in later years. She gets on a train (ticket paid for by said grandmother surely) and rides alone and very pregnant some 3000 miles all the way from Oakland to Greenville to give birth to me in February 1944. February 12, to be exact, the anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s birth date. Lincoln’s birth date growing up was always a separate holiday until they combined Lincoln and Washington’s birthdays into one holiday. That still ticks me off today.
After a few weeks, post-delivery in the good Old Deep South, my mother dutifully gets back on the train to return with me to Oakland, where my father, Rufus Connor Tedards, is stationed in the Army Air Force, training pilots in open-cockpit Boeing Stearman Model 75 aircraft for service in the Pacific Theater during World War II.
We lived in a walk-up apartment in Oakland (which my parents found again in a nostalgic trip to California in the early 1960s), and I accidentally tumbled down its flight of stairs one time and cracked open the soft spot most infants have in the top of their skulls…until it closes around 18 months. I was fitted with a metal plate over that spot until the crack healed itself.
Years after my “big accident” whenever I said or did something particularly dumb, the family would nod to themselves and remind each other that my stupidity could be traced back to that early head injury. They just knew that all my common sense had leaked out of the brain from that early crack in my skull. I am in no position to correct that assessment even today.
