Celebrating your grandmother's 83rd birthday...PRICELESS!

This past Wednesday my grandmother turned 83 years old.

Just four feet ten inches tall, Thelma Hawkins-Nettles is a powerhouse of a woman. She is fearless and what she does not have in height, she makes up for with her razor sharp tongue (her nick name is the cursing bandit) street smarts and mother wit.



My grandmother was raised by her Georgia sharecropping grandparents. She concluded her schooling at the tender age of eight years old, after which she earned her keep by picking cotton.

She gave birth to my mother at the age of seventeen and then headed North to Detroit where she made a made a living as a domestic.

Some years after moving to new York, she met and married Wilfred Nettles, the only grandfather I have ever known and together they raised the four children he had from his previous marriage.

Those children had children and she raised most of them as well.

My grandmother got her drivers license when she was fifty years old. And for years after that she and my grandfather would take six weeks off in the summer and drive their brown Buick Oldsmobile from coast to coast.

After that became tiring, they started cruising.

My grandmother was and still is young at heart. She gave infamous house parties. One party in particular stays with me - I was nine years old and it lasted for three full days -- NO LIE.

Even at 83 years old - she can still cut a rug with the best of them. She is the youngest almost centurion I know!

She is THE family story teller - I wish I could say historian - but that would be stretching it. My grandmother weaves fact and fiction and you have to dig deep to uncover the truth in her TALL tales.

I truly believe that I inherited my gypsy spirt( she's just back from a European cruise) and story telling skills from her.

My grandmother is a stone-cold gambler. She plays her numbers daily, visit Atlantic City (her other home) a few times a month and Vegas is a destination she jets off to at least twice a year.


For her birthday this year, I took her and my mother to Mohegan Sun for a over night stay. We arrived at around 4:30PM, had a wonderful dinner, I gave them both some gambling money and we went our separate ways.



I thought for sure my Native American Ancestors would smile down on me and allow me to win a few duckets. And why wouldn't I think that? The signs were there......the very room we were booked in was my birth date: 2665




Alas, it was not to be so. I went back to the room around 10PM, my wallet considerably lighter and my feelings a little bruised and found my mother in bed watching the news. I fell asleep at about 11PM - when I woke at 1AM, I was alone.

The old gals came rolling in about 2AM with pastries and we sat up talking and laughing for a few hours before falling off to sleep.

Later that morning as I worked my way back down 95, I decided that my Native American ancestors had smiled down on me. No, I hadn't won a nickle, but I had hit the jackpot just the same - I had my mother and my grandmother -my family....that there my readers is priceless.........