Georgia Green Stamper – Georgia On Her Mind

Heroes, I’ve heard, are made, not born. I’d say the same about greatness. You have to be in the right place at the right time for your greatness to get noticed.
 Take Emily Weinstein, the food editor for The New York Times. Not long ago, she wrote a long and serious article for the most widely read newspaper in the world about – are you ready for this –  toasting toast.

Our youngest grandchild, Georgia Jane, is learning to read. She’s in Kindergarten at a shiny new school filled with the most up to date everything. Seven hundred students, in grades K-5, learn with her. Like a traveler from a foreign country, I attempt to tell her about my first school although she stares back at me with uncomprehending eyes. She cannot imagine such a strange place.  

Each person who tells the story changes some detail as though we were archiving various versions of an Appalachian ballad. Sometimes they add a bit information I do not know, shared with them by a relative long dead. More often, they confuse the location, placing it here, then there, on the wrong farms, in the wrong county. They’re hazy about the names of the players. All but hers. Calla Lily Hudson.