Get Your Ya-Ya's Out! It was for many years my family's habit to drive from North Carolina to western New York State to visit the relatives we had left behind. After spending ten days with my mother's family in Binghamton, we would drive the half hour to Cortland and spend an afternoon with my father's mother, the woman we addressed as Ya Ya. Ya Ya owned a newsstand/candy store, a long narrow room fitted with magazine racks and the high, wall-mounted chairs the townspeople occupied while receiving their shoeshines. She lived above the store in the apartment my father had grown up in.