Stand Up Comedian
by Benjamin Herrington
I was a stand up comedian at the age of sixteen.
I gave command performances for an audience of one,
But to me, this audience of one represented my entire lineage.
Minnie Lee, my grandmother, was born in Lee County, Alabama just before the great depression.
I was born in Hartford, Connecticut a week after Elvis died.
Separated by more than fifty years and yet I felt a connection to her beyond just genetics.
She called it first, when I was little kid she said I was my grandfather reincarnated.
My grandfather died before I was ever born, so I never knew why she thought that.
Years later I would learn about our similarities.
The temper, the tilted head in photographs, the ideology, the sense of humor.
When I was fifteen that sense of humor was nearly taken away from me.
One night, my grandmother called out to me.
This wasn’t necessarily a unique occurrence, she always wanted me to do
something.
But it wasn’t the words that concerned me, it was the faintness of her voice that gave me a sense of urgency- My grandmother was one of the strongest people I have ever known.
But when I walked into her room, she looked weak and helpless and as hopeless as that made me feel,
I had to do something.
I shouted for my father and then picked up the phone and dialed 911.
I hung up the phone and time began to move faster and faster and faster,
Until I wound up sitting in the Emergency Room at Bristol General Hospital with my father.
Waiting…
Time had slowed down to a point where minutes felt like days,
And we waited for an hour and a half to find out that my grandmother had less than a year to live.
Until this point in my life, I had been able to see humor in pretty much everything.
My parents split up, I had jokes, I got arrested for the first time, jokes, I always had jokes.
Right up until my grandmother called out
Ben, in that country accent- I had no jokes.
I rode home silently with my father.
When we got home, we talked.
Grandma was gonna need us both to be strong for her.
She needed to be as comfortable as possible.
To this day I remember that it was November.
As I sat there talking to my father about what we were going to have to do for Grandma when she came home, I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that, in one month, I would celebrate my last Christmas with her.
For as much as I had grown up that night, I still had that little kid in me who couldn’t imagine Christmas without Grandma.
No banana pudding. No collard greens. No Grandma?
She had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.
The tumor was too big to even attempt to remove.
She was given a year to live, but me and my father were told to expect less.
When she came home from the hospital, she had an oxygen tank, loads of drugs and a visiting nurse.
Thankfully, the first visiting nurse she had wasn’t very good at her job.
One morning, she made the mistake of moving my grandmother’s cane.
My grandmother was blind and always put her cane in the same exact place.
She knew her way around her own house well enough to find her cane, but that wasn’t the point.
For the first time in over a month, I heard my grandmother cuss someone out.
I laughed to myself and realized that she was going anywhere anytime soon.
The next day, a new nurse arrived.
They ended up sending a woman my father had grown up with and had also attended my grandmother’s church.
It seemed like they did their homework the second time-
I came home from school and found my grandmother sitting at the kitchen table.
If you knew my grandmother, you would understand the significance of seeing her sitting at the kitchen table.
She was on her throne, at the helm, things were right.
I always made a point of talking to her when I got home.
But now I had to go in and prepare her ventilator while I gave her meds, and then give her the ventilator.
It felt awkward the first time so I cracked a joke about how they tell me “
just say no” at school and then I go home to get Grandma high.
I never really had a problem making her laugh, but something about how I said what I said sent her into hysterics.
For a second I thought it was the drugs, but I hadn’t given her the “
good shit” yet.
From that point on, I was Minnie Lee’s personal comedian.
In between performances, I would learn all about who I was by learning about who I came from.
You can read about history forever, but all the books in the world can’t compare to hearing about history from someone who lived it.
Not to mention the fact that no book I’ve ever heard of had been written specifically about my family.
I’m not sure who would have had the courage to write about the pistol packin’ preacher, Rev. Herrington,
My hot tempered grandfather,
Or his similarly tempered wife and son.
Most people in my family will tell you that I was her favorite.
Whether or not that was true isn’t important.
What’s important is that in the days that she believed to be her last, I was her key to immortality.
Not just her own, but the immortality of those who came before her.
I was Paul.
I was Mohammad.
I was
her messenger.
She would tell me our history, my story, my legacy and I would give her my comedic view point on those stories- so that she knew I understood.
This routine continued for one year and one month until,
Just after the Christmas I was told I wouldn’t have with Grandma,
I lost it-
I tried to joke with my grandmother, but I couldn’t.
As hard as I fought to get a single word out, I couldn’t speak.
I sat there and cried, as quietly as I could, I cried.
My grand mother asked me what was wrong, and I got ready to lie to her and then remembered who I was talking to.
I told her that I was happy to still have her around and that I thought I would have lost her already.
Two days later she proved to me, again, that she was still the same old Grandma.
She went to the doctor and cussed him out for lying to me, to her and to my father.
She refused to see me lose my sense of humor.
I went back to telling her jokes.
For two more months, I was a stand up comedian.
Towards the end of February 1994, my grandmother’s condition had degenerated to the point that she couldn’t move from her bed.
Shortly after, she lost the ability to speak but would still react when people visited her.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I went numb.
I couldn’t see her in that condition anymore.
For a week I stopped going in to see her.
And then one night, for reasons I’ll never know,
I got up the courage to go in and tell my grandmother who she was to me, in terms that only she would understand.
She opened her eyes, closed them and winced a little- she got the punch line.
I hugged her and told her I loved her.
A few hours later she passed away.
-My grandmother was born Minnie Lee Bufford, in Lee County, Alabama in 1919.
She married John Woodrow Herrington and raised John Willie Herrington, who, in turn, raised me-
Grandma’s own personal stand up comedian.
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