Sandy Ridings Always Knew How to Make Us Kids Feel Special with the Smallest Acts of Kindness
By: Garrett Mitchell, Staff Writer
garrett@thewoodrufftimes.com
Sandy Ridings was a boy mom. And boy moms just know.
Growing up as a kid in Woodruff during the late 1980s and early 1990s, if you went to daycare, it was either Learning Years or Kiddie Corner. I attended the former, and for those of us who did, save it to say we had a bit of a superiority complex.
I digress.
Learning Years was opened in 1986, the year after I was born, by Sandy and her nieces, Karen and Patsy. My mom enrolled me in 1987, when I was two years old. I don’t remember my first day but my mom does and she told me the story once.
So, she says, I was inconsolable. I cried and cried. It was Miss Sandy, as all us kids would come to call her, that took me in her arms and told my mother to come back in a few hours. When she returned, Miss Sandy was still holding me in her rocking chair. I was fast asleep.
Sandy raised three boys. As I said, boy moms just know what to do.
Learning Years was not just a daycare. It was our home away from home while our parents worked. It was a safe haven. It was where our first formative peer bonds were formed. It was a place we felt loved. Miss Sandy was one of the major reasons we felt that way as children.
Mom sent me a text earlier in July with the news that Sandy had passed away at the age of 78. Her obituary was a poignant ledger of all the times she touched peoples’ lives in the most meaningful ways. Her capacity for love was deep. Reading it, I was happily forced to recall my own memories of Miss Sandy that, even at 41, I remember vividly.
I was a pimento cheese fiend as a young boy. Sandy knew this. One day I asked to come inside from the playground for a restroom visit. There was Miss Sandy, in the kitchen, making a pimento cheese sandwich. I blithely remarked how much I liked them. Without a word, and with only a warm smile, she whipped out two more pieces of bread and made me one. We ate ours together. I was maybe four years old and it was our little secret.
Then there was the beef stew. My goodness. We couldn’t get enough of the stuff when it was on the lunch menu. We would have to be cut off like an overserved wino at closing time. Try as she might, my mother could never duplicate the recipe. Out of ideas and in the vein of curiosity, she one day asked Miss Sandy exactly what her secret was. She was led to the kitchen and presented with an industrial sized can of Dinty Moore. All Sandy did, she explained, was add rice. Maybe it was just because she made it that it tasted so good. I’ll go with that.
One of Miss Sandy’s three sons, Jeremy, was on active duty in the Navy and stationed on an aircraft carrier at sea. Miss Sandy knew I had a love of ships so she helped me write to Jeremy. He wrote me back on a postcard of the great ship. I kept it for many years, well into adolescence. Sadly, I no longer have it. Maybe one day, hopefully, it will turn up.
And, of course, Sandy was the first to have an inkling that I would make a decent writer one day. I was mindlessly scribbling words on a sheet of construction paper with a magic marker. Random letters that just so happened to form an actual word. She told me decades later, actually the last time I ever saw her, that she knew right then that I would be good with words and that she was proud of me.
I was three. And she just knew.
I don’t believe I am being presumptuous when I speak for all of us, especially us boys, who attended Learning Years back then that we had the time of our lives. Most of us continued to grow up together and graduate together. We all have memories from those years. We also all have memories of Miss Sandy.
She was love, kindness, empathy, and understanding all rolled into one. She loved every kid that came through those doors. I like to think she loved us boys just a little bit more. I’m kidding, of course. Slightly.
The building that housed the Learning Years Daycare of my youth still stands behind the bank uptown. Every time I drive past, the memories come flooding back. It’s been almost 40 years now, but they are crystal clear.
Miss Sandy was many things, but most importantly to her, she was a woman of deep faith in God. There is no doubt in my mind she is in Heaven. All of us whose lives she crossed are better for it. Everyone who knew her is better for having done so.
I also know this. If I ever have a son, when I fix his lunch, I will make sure to put the vegetables on top of the Chef Boyardee so he has to eat the healthy stuff first. Boys can be picky, after all.
Miss Sandy knew that, too, just like a boy mom would.
