The faded tee shirt she wears is creeping up over the waistband of her size twenty-two jeans, exposing a dimpled belly that looks like a honeycomb. Her toes slide over the sides of the rubber thong sandals on her feet, making a flip-flopping sound every time she takes a step.

"Hey, Ivy. How're you?"

"Busy, busy, busy," she says in her loud voice, her hands flying. "Dog if my family ain't 'bout to run me plumb crazy."

I feel a column coming on so I'm all ears.

"See, it's like this. All us Johnson wimmen live practically forever. Good genes. My great-great-grandmama, she was a hundred and twenty-seven when she passed. Still had every tooth in her head."

I began to question Ivy's credibility some weeks ago when she filled me in on her six or seven marriages. Now she's talking about a great-great granny a hundred and twenty-seven years old. I don't think so.

"What's that got to do with your family driving you crazy," I ask.

"Listen up, Cappy girl- like your name, by the way." I thank her but she rattles on like she doesn't hear me. "The other day me and my mama, my grandmama, my great-grandmama and my great-great-grandmama went to the Piggly-Wiggly. Mama and me was walking down Aisle Six and the others was on Aisle Seven arguing over whether Maxwell House coffee was as good as Folgers. Terrickly my great-grandmama comes over to Aisle Six crying like a baby, her face all puckered up and shiny.

"My mama said, 'Grandmama, what's the matter with you?'"

Great Grandmama sniffed real loud, wiped her nose with a raggedy Kleenex and said, 'Mama jist now slapped me.'

"Right then, my great-great grandmama come walking up and my Mama yells at her, 'Did you slap Grandmama?'

"She was a hundred and twenty years old at the time, Cappy, and she looked at me and Mama both like we was stone stupid. "Dang straight I did and I'll do it again if she don't shut her mouth. Ain't no youngun' of mine gone sass me and get away with it.' "

I am now laughing out of control.

"Ittn't that enough to drive a person plum crazy?" Ivy Lee grins, knowing that her story is just what I wanted to hear.

I glance down at my watch and then at Ivy. She appears to be cranking up on another tale, so I quickly lie about a dentist appointment.

She digs around in her pocketbook, snatches up a crumpled piece of paper and begins to scribble. "Call me. I wanna tell you the story of my life. You ain't gone believe it!"

You think?

Ivy Lee is a Southern eccentric. There is a distinction between the Southern variety and the Northern kind, you know.

Yankees, as I see it, tend to hide their odd relatives behind two- dollar words like capricious, idiosyncratic, pathological.

Southerners, on the other hand, are proud of the family oddballs. When somebody says their eighty-five year old aunt insists on being called Princess Margaret, we don't react with surprise or, God forbid, discomfit.

We are good Southerners and proud of our birthrights. We don't bat an eye before asking, "Which side of the family is Princess Margaret on? Is it your mama's, or your daddy's?"

And THAT'S what I like about the South!