Thanks for All the Gumbo
August 19th, 2006 by Lou
My father’s mother died recently. Both his parents are gone now. I’m slow, and its taking me some time to think through what my grandparents meant to me.
My grandfather, Stewart Springer, met my grandmother, Vergie Fayard, when she was a librarian in Biloxi, Mississippi. He was an outsider. He was making a living catching and selling animal specimens. My grandfather had dropped out of college. He was a yankee. She was an insider, or surely must have been, a daughter of an an old Biloxi family. I can’t imagine anyone viewed the courtship with anything but disdain.
My grandfather went on to become a well respected scientist in his field: shark taxonomy. Nothing much is written publicly about him outside the usual professional stuff. He was a genuinely warm, delightful and witty, as was his wife. I really enjoyed spending time with them when they were both around.
In response to a note I received from my Aunt Pat after her funeral I responded:
No Tags“I wish [my daughters] could have known them both together, and more as I knew them in Placida: the stories, their remarkable oppositeness and inevitably resigned affection, the intelligence and dry wits on the both of them, the smiles and deceptively simple, diverging conversations, and also the gumbo you eat of course. It was a lot more civilized, refined, subtle and complex than the stuff they make elsewhere.”