We have to go meet the pizza delivery guy. I am always jealous of people in cities who can ride their bikes on sidewalks and have lemonade stands and have pizza delivered right to their doors. Dad orders pizza from the pizza place in Nashville, and then he has to go meet the pizza guy at Van Buren. The extra mile and half from the elementary school to our house is too much for the delivery guy to manage.

Dad heads out to the Crouch’s Market to rent a VHS and get some Coke. Coke doesn’t necessarily mean Coca Cola. “Coke” is any sort of dark soda, the way any tissue is a “Kleenex” or any photo opportunity is a “Kodak Moment.” We get to ride along.

Crouch’s Market has been around since the dinosaurs. It smells like gun oils and wood and the felt that covers a pool table. Norma runs the store. She sells lunch meat and souvenir hats and live bait. Right up by the counter, there are racks with Sour Straws and Kit Kats and Big League Chew Bubblegum.

The movie rentals are in three long rows. Dad rents the same movies every time – “Aliens.” “Predator.” “Terminator.” “Jurassic Park.” “Starship Troopers.”

One time, Gary and I found a huge mushroom in the woods and took my picture with it. It hangs on a board in the back room at Crouch’s, by the pool tables. I like to find it every time we go there. Pictures of Papaw and Troy and Gary with deer and turkeys they hunted are on display there too. We’re famous.

When we get home, Dad munches on the circus peanuts that always accompany a trip to Crouch’s. He cracks and shells nuts while he sits on the couch watching football or basketball or “Rambo.” He mixes peanut butter and syrup in a bowl and makes sandwiches with it.

Maybe once a year, he’ll order a pizza. He calls the pizza place in Nashville. Places the order. Waits a half an hour or forty-five minutes and heads out to Van Buren Elementary to meet the delivery guy who won’t come all the way out to our house.

Snow leaves our yard completely covered in at least a foot of fluffy white. Dad sets about making a snow village in the driveway. Some dads shovel snow so you can get the car out or make a path from the back door to the mailbox.

My Dad makes an igloo and a snow bench that lines the entire driveway. He creates snow chairs and a television with knobs and antennae. My Brother and I make lumpy snowmen out front. They don’t stand a chance in the face of Dad’s art and architecture and smooth edges and pristine, flat surfaces.

 He thinks he’s an artist. Sometimes, I believe him.

Wisdom.

Vinegar cures everything. Indigestion. Bad breath. Lady parts. And you can clean the mirrors with it. Everything.

It doesn’t matter if Clyde did it, you have to clean it up.

“Without my Nana, I’m a nobody. With my Nana, I’m a somebody.” She later updates this little chant to “Without my Jesus, I’m a nobody. With my Jesus, I’m a somebody.”

Get what you pay for. Ordering at the drive-thru window is not as simple as it seems. Nana needs seedless buns (for her colon!) and a hot fudge sundee with no nuts. And if we get a mile away and Sissy finds that there is an onion on her cheeseburger-with-no-onions order, you better believe we’re turning around and heading back to get a refund or a new, onion-less burger.

Auttabin hair is the kind you have when it ought-a been brushed before you left the house.

Always spray a little perfume or cologne on each wrist, your neck, and your undies – “Just in case,” Nana says. Also, always wear clean undies, in case you end up in the hospital.

“When you’re talking to yourself, you’re talking to the devil.” Grandma Dori, Nana’s mom, tells me this while I sit and admire the little glass figurines in her living room. I wonder if she meant to call me the devil?

“Roll me one, Ma!” I have no what this means or where it came from, but every now and then someone shouts this out at a family get-together and everyone busts out laughing.

The Pedigo house. This is how you refer to your house when the kids have trashed it and you want them to clean it up so you tell them, “This isn’t the Pedigo house, you know! Clean it up!”

“I made it snow!” If Nana washes the windows or takes a lot of time fixing her hair. If Papaw waxes the car or fixes a leaky pipe around the house or stacks enough wood. Anytime you do something you should do, but normally don’t, it will snow. Guaranteed.

“Don’t swear, Sarah. Ignorant people swear because they don’t have enough of a vocabulary to express themselves with real words. Don’t swear. It’s trashy.” – Mom

The Matlock curse. If you are a woman with Matlock blood coursing through your veins, you will have cramps on vacation. And on your first date. And at graduation. And on your wedding day. A job interview, choir performance, or moving to a new city. You will  be visited by the Matlock curse.

“Pray about it.” If you ask Nana for advice, she tells you to pray about it. If you don’t ask Nana for advice, there’s a miniature Nana-voice in your head that says, “Pray about it.”

Christmas Eve is at Nana and Papaw’s house. I hear sleigh bells outside, and when we open the front door, a McDonald’s Play Set is out there waiting for me on the porch! I make Gary crawl all on his knees past the drive-thru window and order from a menu of plastic pancakes and rubber fries.

Before it gets too late, we have to go home so we can get to sleep before Santa comes. Mom always says we have to wait until Christmas morning to open our presents, but we are insistent and persuasive little boogers.

“Okay,” she finally says. “You can open your stockings. But that is all.” But we already know we’ve won. An hour and a half later, we sit in a pile of tape and shredded paper and toys we can’t take out of the box yet because we’ll lose the pieces in the mess.

We set out cookies and milk on the kitchen counter. We set out celery and carrots for the reindeer. We feel bad that everyone else forgets about the reindeer. They’re the ones doing all the work, you know – all that flying.

In the morning, Mom wakes us up. She can’t wait for us to get up on our own. She wants us to see what Santa brought. In the dining room, in front of the fireplace, little globs of melted snow on the floor show us the route Santa took from the Christmas tree to the kitchen for cookies and then back up the chimney.  The celery and carrots are nibbled too.

All of our presents from Nana and Mom and Sissy are wrapped and under the tree for ages before Christmas. In the weeks leading up to it, my brothers and I divide up our stacks and shake the boxes and count who has more and therefore must be more loved.

But Christmas morning – Santa Presents – this is different. These presents aren’t wrapped. Four shiny new toys sit in front of the Christmas tree. Our names are displayed in curly, North Pole-esque letters. Our stockings are also magically full again. Candy. Squirt guns. Lip gloss. Teeny figurines. We gorge on sweets and Tic-tac’s. We watch Christmas Vacation before lunch and after lunch and before bed, quoting every single line.

The stores are all closed. So are the restaurants. No one is on the computer or a cell phone or even earphones. We sit cozily ensconced in our little house, losing pieces of our new toys in the discarded wrapping paper, bundling up for brief sledding and snowman building and creek ice skating adventures. We come back inside; our snow-covered things end up sopping wet in the floor by the door.

Hot chocolate.  Eggnog. Homemade peanut brittle and a cheese tray that someone left for Papaw on the mail route. We finally feel brave enough to sneak the candy canes from the tree that have been hanging there as decoration. I like the sweet ones with rainbow colors that taste like skittles or bubble gum.

Our Christmas – the jolliest of holidays.

We are making address books in class. We learn how to put the dashes in our phone numbers and to capitalize the street names in front of our houses. We write our addresses in shaky, oversized letters on thick, dark lines across the page. Everybody in the class gets a copy of our Class Address Book, photocopied on the big copier in the office, with three staples holding it together down the left side.

On Sunday, the phone rings. It is for me.

“Sarah, it’s Ni-ick,” my papaw says.

I am excited! This is the first time the phone rang for me that it wasn’t Sissy or some other family member. A real phone call!

“Hi,” says a little voice on the other line. “I called everybody in our Class Address Book so far down to you and you’re the only one who is home.”

We talk for a minute or two, our nine-year-old selves having little to contribute in the way of conversation.

The trouble, though, is that now a boy has called me. A real boy. From school.

Papaw tortures me mercilessly.

He croons to me, “I just called…. to say…. I love you. I just called… to say… I care.” Some weird old song from a long time ago. Embarrassing.

I’m taunted around the house with “Nick. N-Nick.Nick. Nick. NICK. Nick. NICK-O-LODEON!”

“Oh, Ni-ick. So glad you called,” he mimics me. Except, I don’t think I even said that.

“NO! It’s not like that! I was the first one on the list to answer. He wasn’t even trying to call me especially.” My protests, pouts, and shouts go unanswered. Papaw is not the least bit concerned with who Nick did or did not mean to call.

I live in constant fear that another boy will accidently call me someday. Papaw doesn’t care when four years go by, then ten, and Nick never calls me again. He carries on in his own little pretend world where Nick and I are estranged lovers, holding out for the day we can be together, just calling to say "I love you."