My Mima and Hank Aaron

My very wonderful grandmother Mima was a genteel southern lady. She wore monogramed linen Doncaster dresses with hose and spectator pumps on the hottest of summer days. She served half a canned pear with a dollop of mayonnaise on a butter lettuce leaf and thought that was all you needed for lunch. And she wrote the most beautiful of thank you notes for the smallest of kindness.

I never once saw her wear a pair of pants or heavens forbid shorts or a bathing suit, despite the pool in her yard. She cut the seatbelts out of her peacock blue Dodge Dart because they wrinkled her clothes. And she wrapped Christmas presents better than Neiman Marcus with little springs of pine cones or an elaborate tassel attached to the ribbons.

To me she was everything feminine with big fluffy powder puffs on her dressing table. There was one thing she loved that was the biggest dichotomy to me, The Atlanta Braves.

Mima would listen to the baseball game on the radio in her car, or watch them on TV. I knew nothing about baseball and really didn’t care, but I can remember sitting with her in her sun porch off the kitchen watching the very boring game on TV, back when the picture wasn’t so good so it was hard to see the ball.

Mima told me the best player in the world was Hank Aaron. I believed her since I believed everything she told me. She loved to watch Hank Aaron because he would actually make home runs, the only exciting part of the game to me. I remember Mima being sad when he retired, but that did not end her devotion to the Braves.

As she aged she lost her eye sight to Macular Degeneration. Somehow, as blind as she was she would still watch the Braves on TV, pulled up close to the screen with her head turned slightly to the side. One of the last times I was with her in 1999, before she passed away, she was watching a Braves game and was worried she blocking my view of the screen as she had to be right up on the TV.

“It’s alright Mima, I don’t need to see.”

“You aren’t missing much. Hank Aaron isn’t playing,” she said.

I hope my Mima gets to welcome Hank Aaron to heaven, because that would be the definition of it for her.