Here we see me and Jeff, probably about 1973, in the kind of matching outfits that Mom often put us in back then, standing in Nanny Risby's front yard:
Nanny Risby was what we called her. It never occurred to us then that that was particularly funny, although I see now that it is. "Nanny Risby" – what a peculiar thing to call someone! Well, she was my great-grandmother and her name was Risby Taylor. It's fairly common, or at least it was back then, for part of a person's first name to be incorporated in their Grandparent Title: Grandpa Jack, Grandma Sue, etc. I don't know why we called her Nanny; it was easier to pronounce than Granny, I guess, and apparently one generation removed. I'm not sure who the first person to call her Nanny Risby was; possibly my cousin Sharon. Being the oldest, she tended to name people. Or maybe "Nanny Risby" was what Nanny Risby wanted to be called.
She was always old, as far as I can tell. I often forget this, but she outlived my grandfather, her son-in-law, by a full year. He died of a heart attack in 1978, and she lived until sometime in 1979, maybe even 1980.
Her house was just up the street from my grandmother's. They didn't live very far apart, both in the same neighborhood, Winchester Heights, in Tucker. I go to Tucker every week these days when I take Gabriel to therapy, and sometimes I drive by that old neighborhood; that area has changed a lot over the years, but, regardless of what it looks like now, or who lives there, it has been an important part of my life for more than half a century now.
Sharon once told me that Nanny Risby was a "mean old lady," and maybe she was, but she liked me and was always nice to me. Most of the time that I knew her she had what today we would call Alzheimer's disease or dementia and what then we just called senility. Mostly I remember this as a strange idea she had about her TV not being able to pick up a certain channel (there were only a few back then) that it definitely could. I'm sure her condition manifested itself in other ways, but that's the one that has stuck with me.
Nanny Risby had a boarder named Blanche, also an old lady, whom I always thought was some distant relative of ours. However, Mom told me a couple of years ago when the subject came up that Blanche was just some lady who rented a room in Nanny Risby's house and not a relative at all.
This is Nanny Risby, also standing in her front yard, a little down from where Jeff and I are standing in the picture above, but you can probably tell it's the same house:
This picture may have been made the same day the picture of Jeff and me was made; you can't tell from the pictures, and I don't remember.
That house is still there, of course, though it looks very different now, and Nanny Risby hasn't been there – or been alive anywhere – for about 45 years. I would really love to go inside it and see what it's like today, but even more than that I'd like to be able to revisit the house it was in the 1970s.
