Endora Was Like Frances

My favorite relative is my paternal grandmother, Frances, who was born in 1903 and passed in 1989.

Her mother - my great-grandmother - lived in Missouri, but wanted her child born in Oklahoma, so at the eleventh hour located a man who rowed her across a river to Oklahoma, where Frances was born four years before the Oklahoma and Indian Territories united to become the 46th State in the Union.

In her sixties when my sister and I were born, Frances thought she was too young to be called “Grandmother” and insisted we call her by her first name.

She was a self-made woman, who was proud she'd worked continuously through the Great Depression, eventually owned and maintained rental properties across Oklahoma City, and was a world-traveler for more than sixty years.

Beginning when my sister and I were small children, Frances would appear at our house very much like Endora would swoop into the Stephens' household in Bewtiched: “I just came back from China! I want to take my grandchildren to India!”

My mother was always horrified. “You are not taking them to India!”

Frances usually got what she wanted, and my sister and I fondly remember our summer vacations with her.

In May, 1927, the bubonic plague struck an African port shortly before Frances' transatlantic steamer was to dock, so the ship was diverted elsewhere. The crew was French. A party broke out on the steamer like none other Frances experienced on the night it was learned Lindbergh had flown his airplane from New York to Paris, France, to become the first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.

In 1989, I inherited a map of the world into which Frances had stuck colored pins, different colors representing the number of times she had visited a particular country. (Pins protruded from all but two countries.) Her favorites were India and China.

I like to think I inherited my gift of gab from her: she and I enjoy talking to anyone about almost anything. In the 1970's, after numerous trips to India, Frances became close with an Indian family and was thrilled to attend a young couple's wedding ceremony, which lasted almost three weeks.

I have lots of photographs of Frances in China. She told me she was in the last guided tour through the country before the Cultural Revolution, and she made sure she was in the first guided tour through the country when it again opened its doors to the West.

Over the years, Frances repeatedly told me: “You can do anything you put your mind to.”

I certainly haven't accomplished everything I've set out to do - yet - but I do believe her encouragement has given me the confidence to attempt whatever I want.