May I present... Our Lady of Georgetown.
My grandmother was born in Georgetown, Kentucky. But I actually decided on the title because, coincidentally, she moved onto Georgetown Street in Lexington when she married my grandfather. They married really late, for her era -- she was 36 in 1935. Apparently she waited so long because "I always wanted to marry someone who had something."
Gran-Gran stood out: 5'10", college educated, and haughty when she chose to be. All this made me think of queens, and virgins... which led me to the Virgin Mary, sometimes known as the Queen of Heaven.
By the standards of 'colored' Lexington in the 1930s, her "castle" was pretty swanky -- in what my aunt called "a Park Avenue kind of area."
But being a queen also means being a brood mare, even if you're running a country.
Gran-Gran once told my aunt she "spent her honeymoon in the back of [my grandfather's plumbing] truck." I don't know if that was due to a certain... impatience on my grandfather's part -- he'd already been married and divorced twice -- or if she meant he went right back to work after their wedding and brought her along. But the first version is more interesting.
You might say Gran-Gran got the fairy tale. But it's one thing to hold out for Prince Charming. It's another to be rejected, possibly, for being an overeducated, hardheaded giant of a woman.
Maybe those 'flaws' add up to something I read in a sci-fi short story by Walter Jon Williams: "Imperfection is worth more. Perhaps that says something about our world."
Gran-Gran stood out: 5'10", college educated, and haughty when she chose to be. All this made me think of queens, and virgins... which led me to the Virgin Mary, sometimes known as the Queen of Heaven.