From the time I was a young teen, New Year’s Day meant starting a new journal, a staple gift at Christmas, and looking back at the year that just ended. At that age, looking ahead was difficult, but looking back – well, seems that became my stock-in-trade.As with every New Year’s Eve, yesterday I waxed nostalgic, ruminating on all those who have passed through my life and what they meant to me. Two people stood out, an odd duo to say the least, but each for their own reasons.Uranie Madere Berthelot was my husband’s grandmother and the inspiration for my book, Cedar Grove. When I met her, she’d already taken up residence in a nursing home, was 86 years old and sharp as a tack. Her caustic humor knew no bounds and no one was safe. Her playfulness usually resulted in everyone’s embarrassment, but Grandma didn’t care about that. She had fun, loved her family, and most endearing to me, she thought the sun rose and set on my husband, a sentiment I share.Grandma was Cajun by birth, with a thick accent and a way of pronouncing words that gave this New York girl pause. The eaves of the house was the ease, a sink was zinc, boil was berl, shrimp was always shrimps, and my one syllable name (Tina) was always stretched to two – Ti-na. Oh, how I loved to hear her say my name.Her hands were rarely without her rosary, her devotion to God so profound, she was an inspiration, but her gentle touch as she told a story was everything.I lost my Grandmother eleven years before I met Gramaw (pronounced Gra (short A) –maw). My own grandmother was more precious to me than I can properly say, and her loss when I was seventeen was undeniably painful. I think of her and Gramaw every day. Uranie Berthelot helped fill the gap in my life that had always been my grandmother. We sat for hours in her nursing home room, talking about the past. She loved that. A talker, she filled the time with stories of her childhood and the pain she’d suffered at the loss of five of her ten children—three at birth and one at the age of twenty-six and the other at four.Four of her sons and a daughter, my mother-in-law, lived to adulthood. She lost four daughters in childbirth. Her four-year-old son woke up one Sunday playful and silly, and by nightfall, lay dead in his bed. His name was Lucien, after Gramaw’s father. Twenty-six year old Ernest died in a truck accident. I didn’t know Gramaw then, but she spoke of his and Lucien’s deaths as though they had happened recently. That was the only time I ever saw her weep.She married her husband at the age of sixteen, in 1908. He passed away in 1948, and she mourned him every day until her death on December 31, 1984, three months after our daughter was born. She spoke of him as a young woman would, how handsome he was, how good he was to her and the family. I understand, because I feel the same about her grandson, my husband. No better man has ever walked the earth.Gramaw inspired my character Ranie, in Cedar Grove and After Dark Rag. So much of Ranie is Gramaw, including the name. Gramaw was often an irreverent scamp, and that was the part of her I loved the most. She didn’t mind playing a joke on people, always prefaced by a wink.The second person who stands out in my memory is one I never met. His name was Eric Hilliard Nelson, but he was better known in my youth as Ricky Nelson. He was a singer and actor, and was the person who introduced me to Rock and Roll music.Now you might ask why he, of all people, would have such an impact, when there are so many other people. Well, I can’t answer that question completely. All I can say is, I loved his music. I escaped into his songs at a time that was chaotic for me. Not the usual teenage angst, but something deeper, more insidious, that I won’t go into. “Hello, Mary Lou, Good-bye Heart” and “Travelin’ Man” were some of the first songs I listened to on the radio before I was a teenager. I still remember lying on my parents’ bed, listening to the Top 40 on their turquoise clock radio.Perhaps I think of Rick Nelson as I do not only because of his musical influence, but because of his death. I’m not sure. He died at the age of 45 in a plane crash, on December 31, 1985, one year to the day after we lost Gramaw. I heard the announcement on the early morning news, and then listened to the day of tributes on every channel. The news people played his music from every phase of his career, but many they painted him a disgruntled has been, because of his radical song, “Garden Party”.Briefly, the song is a rant. He’d been invited to play at a revival Rock and Roll concert at Madison Square Garden in October 1971. He came out on stage with stylish shoulder-length hair and dressed in a purple velvet shirt and bell-bottom pants, all the fashion at the time, but not what his fans were used to seeing. He sang a couple of songs and then struck up a version of the Rolling Stones song “Country Honk.” The audience booed him off the stage.“Garden Party” was in many ways, his declaration of his break with the past. He’d moved on from teen idol and wanted to play his new songs. The crowd wanted none of it. As “Garden Party” says, “If memories were all I sang, I’d rather drive a truck.”There’s another line that helped shape my adult life. “Ya can’t please everyone, so ya gotta please yourself.” Those words resonate with me in every facet of my life. I, too, spent a great many years pleasing others. I came to conclude that a happier me makes for a happier family. My loved ones appreciate that insight.So, there you have it. Two very different people, connected in more ways than sharing a death date. They pleased themselves, they influenced others, and both loved the past, though they preferred not to dwell in it. There’s a lesson there.Happy New Year, all. Here’s to health and happiness. Thank you for reading the stories that please me, thank you for your interactions on social media, and most of all, thank you for considering me a friend. May 2019 be a year to remember, in all good ways. I got a new journal for Christmas, and I’ll record all the momentous events.