The Gollywhopper tore up Ol' Jake

My Grammy was easily the single biggest influence on my early life. A lot of my early memories are of her and Poppy and life at her house.

Now, Grammy wasn't your average grandmother. She was amazing in every way; she could cook anything you wanted to eat, knew every story a kid could want to hear, she could fix anything you broke, and could make the very best forts ever. She also had a secret language. At least I thought it was a secret language when I was a kid. None of my friends seemed to know what I was talking about when I used her words, and my teachers always told me they didn't exist. But my cousins and I and Grammy knew what they meant. It was cool, like a club.

So to ease you into some of these I will start with some of the easier ones:

Fiddlesticks - this is the word Grammy would use if we made a ridiculous statement, which kids are wont to do. For example, "Grammy, Jason and Steve are in the back bedroom playing with their GI Joes and they said they are going to kill all our Barbies!" Her response would be "Oh, Fiddlesticks, now go on and play." And we would.

Scissorbill - This was her word for you when you got a smart mouth going. My mom was the first person to be bestowed with this moniker. Amazingly enough, I earned it a couple times, too. When I was a young mom, I was watching The Little Mermaid with my daughter, Erika, and one of the Seagulls used the word Scissorbill. I was stunned!

Whomperjawed - this was used for things that were just... wrong... Things that got all kinds of messed up or just off-kilter could be whomperjawed. Now, if something was specifically crooked, then you would say it was "crooked as a dog's hind leg".

Gollywhopper - this was one of my favorites. Grammy would play a game where you would lay on the couch with your head in her lap and she would start with her finger on your "noggin" and she would trace around to your ears, eyes, etc, until she would land on and "get" your gollywhopper (your throat) and send you into fits of giggles.

Now, while there are many, many others I am going to focus on one other saying because for a long time this one really messed me up. Why I never asked anyone to explain, I can only chalk up to stubbornness, or embarrassment over the fact that everyone else in my family seemed to know who Ol' Jake was.

Grammy and Poppy's house had two living rooms, the one that shared space with the kitchen and had a TV in it, and the formal "Blue" living room. The Blue room was where us kids went to play many times while the adults were visiting in the other room. The standard admonishment before heading in there was "Now, don't go tear up Ol' Jake".

In my young mind I had no idea who Jake was, but I accepted that he was old. Hanging on the main wall in the Blue room was an old black and white photo of Grammy's parents. Of course, then I had no idea who they were, just that they were old and very grouchy looking. Naturally, I assumed the man was Ol Jake. One question answered, but that opened others in my mind, such as:

1)Why wasn't anyone concerned about us tearing up the old woman? I felt kind of sorry for her, I mean no one even called her by her name.
2) How did they think we would tear him up when he was safely up on the wall? What did they think we did in there, anyway?

Then one day we were going to the back bedroom to play and Grammy said "we're gonna be leaving soon to go over to the church, so don't be tearin' up Ol' Jake back there."  What? Jake's in the Blue room, not in the back bedroom. Is he? I remember looking real closely on the walls of that room and no Ol Jake! So my theory changed that day and I decided that Ol Jake just might be a ghost, although how some kids could tear up a ghost was more than my 6 year old little mind could logic through.

Then, the ultimate wrench was thrown one Saturday when my Mom, Dad, me and my brother were at my Dad's folks house and my Mom yells down the stairs at me and my cousin Bobby "It's awfully loud down there, you kids don't be tearin up Ol Jake, okay?" 

Seriously? I looked over at Bobby expecting a look of horror as he realizes that a creepy old ghost has followed my family over to his home, but... nothing. Maybe he didn't hear, or more likely, Bobby - lover of all things that normal people cringe at - loved the idea of having a creepy old ghost. Heck, he probably was making a pallet for Ol Jake in the downstairs living room and planning to pop popcorn and charge his friends a quarter a piece to see the creeper.

I don't know exactly how long it took me to figure out that Ol Jake meant whatever room or area you were in. I still don't know why it's called that, but I do know for absolute surety that Grammy's daddy was not a ghost and his name was not Jake!

In His Blessings,
Tracy