Mrs. Franklin

I have discovered one thing: I am terrible at writing epitaphs. For about two hours last night I sat in front of my computer compacting the life of Mrs. Mabel Franklin into one blog post, and I failed miserably. Well, here I am to try it again.

I have to face a few problem. I am not talented enough to describe Mrs. Franklin's persona to those of you who never met her. I do not have time to tell, in detail, all the spiders, breakfasts, and nightly talks that I endured while living in her house. To those who never met her and those who do not know that I lived under the care and supervision of a 91 year old woman for one year, I'm afraid you will have to be left out for one blog post.

Mrs. Mabel Franklin passed away a few nights ago due to complications from stroke. I believe she had been looking forward to this day since her husband died twenty-six years earlier. She entered the world the year WWI started in Europe--1914-- and she passed away at the respectable age of 93. She was a caring old lady, and probably the most stubborn woman I ever met. She lived in the same house in green hills for over sixty years, attended the Granny White CofC (I believe as long as she lived at the house, but I can't remember), and made her signature Coca-cola cake every time a pot luck was held, someone passed away, or a holiday was quickly approaching on the calendar.

I will not, despite the temptation, dilute Mrs. Franklin's memory with a load of cliches that we bestow on those who have passed away. As I said earlier, Mrs. Franklin had a stubborn streak a mile long: she would never ever hear of someone turning down her breakfast (believe me I know), and nothing, absolutely nothing, ever changed in her house on Francis avenue. Her life seemed ruled by the fear that somewhere, in the slum that is Green Hills, somebody wanted to break into her house and kill her. I don't know why, I guess she saw too many reports of an elderly African American woman being murdered in East Nashville and thought that might be her one day. I sometimes fantasized her fear derived from secret ties she had with the mafia in the late 1920's and that she did something so egregious it justified paying a mob hitman, eighty years later, to search out and kill an elderly woman. Or, and this is probably more realistic, she never trusted the banks and had a suitcase stuffed with thousands of dollars hidden somewhere in the house, and if anyone ever did find out its location, they just might break in and try to steal it (I think that happened in my hometown like twenty years ago, I digress).

I will never know what made Mrs. Franklin live the way she did, but I do know this fear lead to my spending a year of my life in her house on Francis avenue. She always wanted a young man to be there after dark so she could feel safe, and for one year that young man was me. If you know me, I largely abhorred this experience for many reasons.

First of all, nothing good comes from a nineteen-year old male living with a torturous nine o'clock curfew. Every day for a whole year, save five or six nights, I would ring the doorbell of her house before 9:30, wait for her to unlock from the inside, and walk into her house with a somewhat doleful "Hello Mrs. Franklin. How are you?" Let me tell you, nothing kills a social life like coming home at nine every night, even on the weekends. Kids my age were partying, going to movies, clubbing, etc. and I, as it seemed, was the only teenager in America who stopped my day at nine every night so an elderly woman could sleep in peace. Living with her couldn't have come at a worst time. When I began the service, I had just finished a disastrous freshman year and had the intentions of starting college over. I would do things, I would leave my dorm room, I would go to basketball games, I would join clubs. It was going to be my Renaissance; the world would not hold Jonathan Harrison down any longer! And then I moved into her house. Of course, I saw myself as a some sort of Saint for doing the thing that I was doing--sacrificing myself for the sake of an 91 year old lady--until I discovered few people actually care, and practically no one is there to help you out even when you need it.

Secondly, I found her house, the spoiled kid that I was, almost inhabitable. Her house had not changed in sixty years; it had no central air and only an old furnace in the winter time. The house also had a spider infestation of biblical proportions. Do you remember the spider photo from the beginning of the year? One of those spiders climbed up the curtains during breakfast one day. One day a spider zoomed across the floor of my room while I said on the phone "I think I just saw a chipmunk crawl across the carpet." In that year I found hundreds of decent size spiders lounging in a corner, sitting in the sink when I woke up to get a glass of water (every time, without fail), hanging out in my closet, or chilling in the bathroom sink. In addition (I love typing that), the bathroom had a camel cricket infestation. Yes camel crickets. Google that, and then imagine a Camel Cricket being the first thing you see when you walk into the bathroom in the morning. If karma does exist, I'll be paying for all the insects I killed for the next three lifetimes (really I killed about one a day).

One last intricacy of the process drove me batty. I loved Mrs. Franklin's cooking, but the woman believed a man should eat his weight in biscuits, gravy, bacon, country ham, jelly, eggs, orange juice, and toast every morning. I had never eaten so much food; It never stopped. You need to imagine Thanksgiving every morning to have an idea. She would wake up at six-thirty, start cooking, and not stop until about seven fifteen. I ate a pound of food before eight Anni meridian, and she would not have me eating any less but every crumb of her breakfast. Oh I pleaded; I begged. I would lay prostrate on the kitchen floor crying "All I want is a bowl of cereal, all I want is a bowl of cereal Mrs. Franklin. Please Mrs. Franklin, that's all I want to eat! Please have mercy!" But no convincing could change her mind. She knew what was best for me and my health. It got to the point where I had to choose between yelling at her to stop cooking or eat her breakfast. You know which one I choose. I gained about eight pounds in the first month before I took a up running program that lasted the rest of the year. Man what a woman.

You may wonder why I did it (and I've had to explain it hundreds of times). Something inside of me couldn't live knowing I had a chance to make a 91 year old woman's life peaceful and I passed it up. Of course all that altruistic hokus-pokus vanished in the first week, and I truly believe it's possible to do something with one hundred percent unselfish motives and hate every single minute of it. Although I guess free rent may sound like a selfish motive, I would give ten times the amount of money I saved to go back in time I say "No actually, I think I would like to live in the dorm this year."

But, while altruism moved me into her house, guilt and pride kept me there 370 days. When it came to October, and everyone was begging me to move back into the dorm, I would have absolutely none of it. I could not bear to look an elderly woman in the eyes and say "I just can't stand living in your house." How would that make her feel? Would anyone want to do that? No I wasn't going to do it. I was going to stay a whole year at least. And plus I, Jonathan Harrison, had to persevere. I had to show people that I would overcome the situation that I was in. Living with Mrs. Franklin would not beat me. Moving into the dorm would be a cop-out; it would be running away from a challenge. No I would do a whole year at least, and no one, not even my own parents, would convince me. Two years later, I regret that decision. I would bear her dissapointment and have an entire semester back to myself if I could do it over. I am a little wiser now than I was then, and it applies directly to the situation I am in today.

Yes, without Mrs. Franklin I would not be coming home January. No one should throw away ten months of their life in order to avoid the disappointment of others and prove something to themselves. Life is too short to do something you absolutely hate. Yes, without Mrs. Franklin's house I would have contemplated coming home early, thought about how it would disappoint my students, realize I had a contract to fulfill and then thrown myself off the top floor of the teaching building sometime in mid-February. Whether she knew it or not, she gave me the wisdom and gumption to get out. Yes, yes she did. I would like to thank her for that one day.

I have to admit when I heard she had a stroke last week I almost cried. The old woman encompassed an entire year of my life, good or bad. She talked to me an hour every night for 370 days; I once joked I knew her better than my own grandparents. And despite all the bad, there was still some good. Mrs. Franklin cared more for others than she ever cared for herself; I have never seen a woman love her family more. She may have never been wrong about anything in her entire life, but she channeled most of that strong energy into a maternal affection that she used to mother anyone that would give her the time. She was ruled by worry, but most of the worry in her life originated from what others loved ones were doing, and not her self. She wanted the absolute best for everyone she knew.

I look back with some irony on the last time I spoke with her. When I called her to congratulate her on her 93 birthday, I had just finalized my plans to go to China. She asked me what was new in my life, and I had told her. Her response went something like this:
"Well why in the sam-hill would you want to go to China to teach English for?" She thought it a terrible idea, and thought I shouldn't go. I never got to tell her, and I had full plans of doing so, that she had been right about the whole thing. Of course she didn't need my validation to know that she was right, but I think she would have gotten some pleasure out of hearing me say that.

But like I said in the beginning, she half expected death to come at any moment. I remember distinctly the first time I heard her say it. I thought to myself "I got to call somebody. I think she plans on dying on me tonight! She can't die, I just started doing this!" Little did I know, she said the same thing every night, the same ominous mantra that sounded her way to bed. But the shock from hearing it the first time I will never forget. She had just walked to the foot of the stairs, in preparation to climb up to her bed-room on the second floor. She stopped, let out a long-sigh, looked at me with those glaucoma-stricken eyes and murmured the phrase I will never forget:

"I'll see you in the morning if nothing happens."