“Does it have to go up my nose?” I asked my Grandma as she slathered Vicks VapoRub vigorously all over the front side of my body.

“Yes,” she replied with absolute authority.

Mildred “Millie” Owen Rabdau was born on this day [December 18] in 1910 in Boise, Idaho and she may not have had absolute authority then, but by the time I came into the world, I think she had it pretty much figured out. I remember her as a wry, jaunty visitor toting a cigarette, wielding a cup of coffee, and imparting advice and loving support in equal doses.

I was certainly in awe of her and, though she once told me I had the quietest little voice ever (“you’d just peep”), I do recall asserting my own opinion once when I was about six.

“Stop worrying,” she said.

“I’m not worrying, I’m wondering,” I shot back at her (in a peep).

“No, you’re worrying, and you should stop. It’s no use.”

To this day, I find myself contemplating the fine line between wondering and worrying. It’s funny because my mom and my aunt both told me about how she used to sit and twirl her hair with one finger, sometimes staring off into space, sometimes doing a crossword puzzle, sometimes reading the paper. Was she twirling and wondering? Or twirling and worrying?

In an oral history collected by my mom’s sister, Aunt Yvonne Alexander, Grandma Rabdau said that when she was growing up she’d had ambitions of becoming a woman business executive and never getting married, but she met my grandfather, and “that was the end of that.”

I find it sad that women didn’t have a great deal of choice at that time but she certainly didn’t let go of her ambitious nature entirely. Aunt Yvonne wrote: “Whenever we’d walk around town, she’d greet everyone on the street so it took a lot of time to walk anywhere. She seemed to know everyone! She was very political and was the Latah County Democratic Committee Chair for the John F. Kennedy campaign. She loved to argue politics and always championed ‘the underdog.’”

When I was heading off to college, I felt like an underdog myself and told her as much: “I’m scared about leaving on my own,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” she replied with absolute authority. “You’ll live through it.”