For the record
Feb. 27th, 2006 01:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miss_pryssI'm writing things down that I don't ever want to forget.
1) My father's parents used to live in a big beautiful gingerbread victorian house in the flat, flat planes of Illinoise farmland. We went to visit them there a few times a year, and there was a breakfast nook in the kitchen, which was the most modernly appointed room in the house. We'd eat breakfast in the kitchen nook, usually doughnuts and coffee cake that my grandfather would go out and buy special early in the morning. He always got up really early. I have this strangely strong sense-memory of those doughnuts, their slightly crisp exteriors and soft, spongy interiors that soaked up milk from my glass.
2) My mother's father died... last year, or the year before? I'm kind of shocked that I'm already having trouble figuring this out. I think it must have been the year before last, because it was in the early Spring and last spring Mr. Smarty-Pants and I were planning the wedding and I know I'd remember if my mother's father had died while I was planning my wedding. It just... feels more recent than that.
My grandfather was kind of a pillar of the community type, in a very artsy, liberal community. He was an artist and taught at the local college most of his career. He was very involved in local political causes, memorably chaining himself to a fence so that the earth-moving equipment couldn't pass through to begin breaking ground for a very unwelcome new dump. My grandfather and many of the other protesters were arrested, but the dump was cancelled. I don't know much about the whole issue, so I'm not sure how much I actually personally agree with his stand, but this sort of thing tended to make him a popular figure. A big element of it was also his personal presence and bearing: he was very tall, very serious, very sweet, and very quiet. He asked unanswerable questions and said inscrutible things that usually seemed profound and were always poetic. The single most frequently used adjective in reference to my grandfather was "saintly". Very, very few people ever saw him get angry. I didn't.
Anyway, there was a memorial service at the church he helped build, and then a reception at the house he did build. He was a sculptor, and my mother and her sisters had arranged his work in his studio, which is attached to the house, with candles and other pretty things. I was sitting in the studio with my mother and her sisters, and they got to talking about when my mother and her sisters were very young and the family lived in Philadelphia.
My grandfather used to regularly visit the inhabitants of a charitable hospital for incurable cases -- crazy people; terminal people with nowhere else to go; people so sick or disabled they couldn't care for themselves and had no-one to care for them. My grandfather went there often to visit with the inmates, sometimes by himself, sometimes with his (very reluctant) daughters. There was one guy there, who I think really might have been called Stumpy, who had no arms and legs and couldn't talk. His bed had walls like a box so he didn't fall out. My grandfather would sit with him. He may have been his only visitor.
My mother's younger sister recalled that when he heard my grandfather's *footsteps* in the hall, Stumpy would set up a rucus, banging himself against the walls of his bed. It scared the bejesus out of my mother and her sisters, but sitting in my grandfather's studio a week after he had died, my mother, who had spoken at the memorial service about how everyone insisted on ascribing saintliness to her father, when the most powerful and important and good thing about him was that he was a man, just a man, fallible -- my mother said, thoughtfully, "Geeze, maybe he *was* a saint."
My mother and her sisters laughed, and I went to get another glass of wine.
1) My father's parents used to live in a big beautiful gingerbread victorian house in the flat, flat planes of Illinoise farmland. We went to visit them there a few times a year, and there was a breakfast nook in the kitchen, which was the most modernly appointed room in the house. We'd eat breakfast in the kitchen nook, usually doughnuts and coffee cake that my grandfather would go out and buy special early in the morning. He always got up really early. I have this strangely strong sense-memory of those doughnuts, their slightly crisp exteriors and soft, spongy interiors that soaked up milk from my glass.
2) My mother's father died... last year, or the year before? I'm kind of shocked that I'm already having trouble figuring this out. I think it must have been the year before last, because it was in the early Spring and last spring Mr. Smarty-Pants and I were planning the wedding and I know I'd remember if my mother's father had died while I was planning my wedding. It just... feels more recent than that.
My grandfather was kind of a pillar of the community type, in a very artsy, liberal community. He was an artist and taught at the local college most of his career. He was very involved in local political causes, memorably chaining himself to a fence so that the earth-moving equipment couldn't pass through to begin breaking ground for a very unwelcome new dump. My grandfather and many of the other protesters were arrested, but the dump was cancelled. I don't know much about the whole issue, so I'm not sure how much I actually personally agree with his stand, but this sort of thing tended to make him a popular figure. A big element of it was also his personal presence and bearing: he was very tall, very serious, very sweet, and very quiet. He asked unanswerable questions and said inscrutible things that usually seemed profound and were always poetic. The single most frequently used adjective in reference to my grandfather was "saintly". Very, very few people ever saw him get angry. I didn't.
Anyway, there was a memorial service at the church he helped build, and then a reception at the house he did build. He was a sculptor, and my mother and her sisters had arranged his work in his studio, which is attached to the house, with candles and other pretty things. I was sitting in the studio with my mother and her sisters, and they got to talking about when my mother and her sisters were very young and the family lived in Philadelphia.
My grandfather used to regularly visit the inhabitants of a charitable hospital for incurable cases -- crazy people; terminal people with nowhere else to go; people so sick or disabled they couldn't care for themselves and had no-one to care for them. My grandfather went there often to visit with the inmates, sometimes by himself, sometimes with his (very reluctant) daughters. There was one guy there, who I think really might have been called Stumpy, who had no arms and legs and couldn't talk. His bed had walls like a box so he didn't fall out. My grandfather would sit with him. He may have been his only visitor.
My mother's younger sister recalled that when he heard my grandfather's *footsteps* in the hall, Stumpy would set up a rucus, banging himself against the walls of his bed. It scared the bejesus out of my mother and her sisters, but sitting in my grandfather's studio a week after he had died, my mother, who had spoken at the memorial service about how everyone insisted on ascribing saintliness to her father, when the most powerful and important and good thing about him was that he was a man, just a man, fallible -- my mother said, thoughtfully, "Geeze, maybe he *was* a saint."
My mother and her sisters laughed, and I went to get another glass of wine.
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my grandfathers
Date: 2006-02-27 06:51 pm (UTC)Memorable things about Grandpa Lefty: His AOL user profile listed his interests as archery, darts and "lovin' the ladies".
The last time I had dinner with my Grandpa Chambers, I took him out for Chinese. He loved Chicken Chow Mein, but had somehow managed to go 84 years without ever eating a snowpea. He told me how he mostly lived on this stew he made with chicken stock and "twelve kinds of vegetables!", and I knew he had enough canned foods to last through a nuclear winter. When I asked him to try some, he liked them immediately, and said, "I like these snowflakes. Do they come in a can?"
I'm glad your grandfather was such a good man, and that you remember that about him.
Re: my grandfathers
Date: 2006-02-27 07:04 pm (UTC)Grandpas Lefty and Chambers both sound awesome. As someone with a fondness both for strange vegetable stew and darts, I immediately find both of them very appealling. :)
Funny thing about my grandfather: I loved him and I know he was a good man, but I don't think I really knew him. One of the things about him that made people think "saint!" was that he seemed a little bit distant all the time, as though he were devoting significant concentration to not just floating up into the clouds. It made it a bit hard to get a sense of him.