Today is not merely Father's Day; it's coincidentally my maternal grandmother's birthday. Were Mamaw still with us, she would be ninety-seven today. She was one of three non-Tennesseans in the family; although her parents were Tennessee natives, she was born in Cook County, Illinois, but they moved home when Mamaw was quite young.

She was married and gave birth to her first son in 1933. Her next two pregnancies ended with two dead children; her first daughter lived six weeks and is buried beside Mamaw and Papaw in a cemetery not a mile from where I sit; her second son lived six days and is buried in California, where my mom was born a year later. They moved home when Mom was about two, and my aunt and uncle were born here.

Mamaw never quite recovered from the loss of her two babies, though. Among hillbillies it was a custom in the old days to preserve the "crown" which was a whorl of feathers said to form beneath the head of a person who died on a feather pillow. She kept that from my older aunt; Mom has it yet, tucked into a big matchbox, just as Mamaw kept it. After Papaw died, her younger children took her to California for a visit and while they were there took her to her other baby's grave--a visit that my usually voluble mamaw never discussed.

I am the third oldest of her ten grandchildren, the oldest child of her fourth child and second daughter. And as many first babies are, I was two weeks overdue. The doctor calculated that I would arrive, most likely, on Mamaw's fiftieth birthday, June 15th.

Except, of course, I was born ornery. I was gonna be born on MY schedule, thank you very much, and arrived at something like 5:30 the next morning in a pouring rain--reminiscent of Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons": "I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine--"

When I was older, Mamaw formed the habit of calling me, every year on her birthday to remind me I was late. It used to piss me off no end; I learned to cope by observing drily, as she decried in my young womanhood my choice of jobs and failure to get married, that I was a disappointment to her from the day I was born.

It's only now, as I near the age she was when I was born, that I see what that phone call was all about: it was our private joke, the one thing she and I shared that nobody else in the family could.

It took years after she passed (eighteen years ago this coming October) for me to stop listening for the phone to ring on my birthday.

That's tomorrow. And strange though it may sound, I think I'll be listening for that call. It won't come, but I'll wait with a laugh anyway.

Happy birthday, Mamaw. Love ya.