Quite a pair

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, October 8, 2005

EVERETT – When J.P. Oliver came home from football practice the other day, two freshly-baked cakes awaited him on the dining room table.

Michael V. Martina / The Herald Marriam Oliver loves to cook, and her 17-year-old grandson, J.P. Oliver – a Cascade High School football player – ”will eat anything I cook and anything anybody else cooks,” his grandmother said.

Just what he had asked his grandmother to do for him when he left for school that morning.

He won’t eat both of them, will he? “Yeah, he will,” said Marriam Oliver, as she carefully put the finishing touches on the icing.

She called them “throw-together” cakes. No decorations. No fancy lettering. Just cake and frosting. “Now I’ll fry him up some chicken wings for dinner,” she said.

If anyone else ate like that, they’d weigh 400 pounds before long. But when you’re an energetic teenager who plays both offense and defense for your high school football team, you burn up a ton of calories. And thanks to a rigorous weight-lifting regimen, J.P. Oliver is built. “Like a rock,” said his coach, Jake Huizinga, of Cascade High School.

This despite a gargantuan appetite. “He can eat a cow by himself, then ask, ‘What’s for dinner?’” his grandmother said. “He’ll eat anything I cook and anything anybody else cooks.”

But only his grandmother’s food has an ingredient that makes it extra special: a large cup of love.

Marriam adores her grandson, and J.P. worships the ground his grandmother walks on.

“I love the woman,” he said after practice one night last week. “We have a great time.”

Both are genuine characters with a good sense of humor. When they’re together, they love to tease one another.

J.P. often comes in the house and laughingly demands that his grandmother – whom he and everyone else refers to as “Mama” – “give me some sugar.”

“No,” she’ll reply, a twinkle in her eye, “I don’t feel like giving you any kisses.”

“Mama,” he’ll say, pity in his pout, “don’t you love me?”

And on and on the repartee goes between a spunky 70-year-old lady and a sprightly 17-year-old boy.

J.P. has a nickname for his grandmother: Hannibal.

“She wears this mask to bed to help her sleep (she has sleep apnea),” J.P. said, “and the first time she put it on I said she looked like Hannibal Lector.”

That broke Marriam up.

Just you wait, she said, if you live long enough you may have to wear a mask, too.

Theirs, as you can see, is a very special relationship. She is the only mother he has ever known.

Marriam took J.P. – and his two sisters – into her home when he was four months old and he’s been there ever since. His biological mother -the third of Marriam’s five children – had a drug problem. “We figured if we didn’t take them, the state would divide them up,” said Marriam, who lives with another daughter, Angela Blocker, in south Everett. “We wanted the children to know their heritage.”

Fifty-three at the time, Marriam knew it would be a challenge to raise another family. And it has been.

“Of course,” she said. “Oh man, you don’t want to hear that. We’ve been through hell – 10 years of fighting the state to adopt the children.”

There has been trauma in the family. One of the granddaughters – J.P.’s sister, also named Marriam, after her grandmother – is in prison for taking part in a murder four years ago. Fourteen at the time of the crime, she was sentenced to 22 years in prison.

J.P. was very close to his sister. “That was hard for J.P.,” his grandmother said. “He was at that age where he was very vulnerable.” People said things that hurt him. “J.P. stayed in a shell for a long time,” she added.

That wasn’t all he was up against. His biological mother would have nothing to do with him. “His mother hates him and that hurts,” Marriam said, wiping away tears. “She won’t do anything for him.”

Yet when J.P.’s mother was burned over 30 percent of her body in a fire that left her face disfigured, her mother – Marriam – made daily trips for nine months to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle to be with her. “I held prayer vigils for her every day, Monday through Friday,” Marriam said.

A special woman, a special mother, a special grandmother is Marriam Oliver.

She has four living children (a son, Andrew, died of a massive heart attack at the age of 28), 21 grandchildren and nine great grandchildren. And there is nothing she won’t do for any of them.

From the time J.P. started in tee-ball at the age of 4 through Friday night’s game with Lake Stevens, she and Aunt Angela have always been there for J.P. “Every time,” Marriam said, “through rain, sleet, snow and hail.”

If J.P. doesn’t see Marriam in the crowd, he’ll sometimes hear her. “Come on Boo,” she shouted his nickname at the Monroe game recently. “I don’t know why I call him Boo,” she said. “He’s just my Boo.” Then, when he scored the winning touchdown on a 52-yard run, she raised her arms in triumph and hollered, “yahoo.”

“I heard her,” J.P. said with a smile. “She was pretty close to the field.”

He has given “Mama” plenty to cheer about this season.

Entering Friday night’s game, J.P. – the Bruin fullback – was averaging 4.7 yards per carry and had scored five touchdowns. On defense, the 5-foot-10, 220-pound senior has been handing out hard hits from his linebacker spot.

The only time he comes out of a game is on a change of possessions. He sits for a moment, gets a drink and goes back in.

The day before Cascade played Monroe, J.P. got a call on his cell phone from a player on the Bearcats team. The kid gave his name, the number he’d be wearing and the position he’d be playing on defense – linebacker. Then, as J.P. recalled, he said, “I’ve just got one thing to say. When you come through my hole, don’t be scared.”

To which J.P. responded, “I told him when he sees the top of my helmet, he’s gonna get ‘truck-sticked.’ That’s from the Madden 2006 (video game).”

“That kid told J.P. not to run up the middle,” Marriam chuckled. “So where’d he run? Up the middle.”

J.P. is an aggressive runner, as befits a fullback in the Wing-T offense. He lowers his head and shoulders and smashes on through.

He is much bigger and stronger than he was a year ago, when he played wingback on offense and safety on defense. An off-season lifting program, supervised by Bruin assistant coach Nick Clovsky, allowed him to go from 175 pounds to his current 220. “He did it the clean way,” Huizinga said, meaning no steroids.

The clean way got him a bench press of 385 pounds this year, almost 100 pounds more than he lifted a year ago.

Marriam and Aunt Angela recognized that J.P. had athletic talent at an early age and always encouraged him to participate in sports. “We kept him in sports to keep him on the right track,” Marriam said. “There was no sport J.P. couldn’t play. God has blessed him with this talent. Like I always tell him, someday somebody will pick you up.”

He has received letters from a number of colleges – Oregon, Oregon State, Georgia Tech, Washington and Nebraska, to name a few. “If he gets a chance to play in college, I don’t know where they’ll use him,” Huizinga said, “but they’ll find a place.”

J.P. is still trying to find a place in his heart for the academic side of school. “I dislike it so much,” he said. “I’m working on that now.”

His grandmother has kept after him to keep his head on straight, do his homework and get good grades. “I tell him that when he walks across that stage and gets that piece of paper (his diploma), you owe me,” she said firmly. “He says, ‘What do you mean I owe you?’ I tell him ‘because I put you through school.’ He’s got a good brain, he’s just got to use it.”

Whoever signs him will be getting a gregarious lad, a player who, Huizinga says, enjoys the spotlight and speaks his mind. When it was mentioned that J.P. has been described as a “character,” the coach said with a laugh. “I would agree with that.”

He’s not unlike his grandmother, who, after 22 years as a cook at the Seattle Space Needle, is a volunteer worker in the surgery waiting room at Providence Everett Medical Center. On a recent morning, she was answering phones, tending to her chart, in and out of the waiting room to gather information, explaining a heart procedure to the family of a patient who was in surgery and keeping things light. After she walked back into the room, a woman stopped her. “Marriam?” she said.

“No,” Marriam replied with a straight face, “she’s not here anymore. She went home.”

Then, with a little smile creeping across her face, she warmly took the woman’s hand and answered her question.

“She owns that room,” said recovery room nurse Karen Campbell. “When she was off recuperating from surgery (she had a triple bypass a few months ago), she’d call in on the days she was supposed to work to make sure everything was good and to be sure the person who was taking her place knew it was temporary.”

Marriam loves to cook, has a lot of her own old South (she’s from New Orleans) special-touch recipes that call for a pinch of this and a pinch of that which make them mouth-watering just to hear her grandson J.P. talk about them. This is how good they are. J.P. doesn’t like fish. But he gorges himself on his grandmother’s catfish and snapper specialties.

And her okra gumbo? J.P. was taking it to school for lunch last year and selling it to his buddies. “A lot of people don’t know about soul food,” he said. “They were giving me seven dollars for it.”

For a few moments, he turns serious and talks about his life and his sister’s life. “I want people to know that I’m succeeding through the hard times,” he said.

He said his sister will miss out on a lot while she’s in prison and he wants to be there for her when she gets out. “I want to be successful so I can help her get out on her own,” he said.

Moments later, he left and went home to be with his grandmother.