We ALL come from different backgrounds.... We ALL were raised virtually completely differently... Yet we all face a similar life......
Golfing tonight. One buddy, given up by his 16 yr old mother for adoption.. His aunt and uncle actually adopted him... He's had a wonderful life.. Yes, some contact with birth mother, but not much...
Another buddy "My dad died when I was in first grade... and my mother died when I was in 6th grade." Dang Dave, I'm sorry to hear that.. who raised you then? "Well, I was the youngest of 9 kids, so one of my older sisters basically raised me." Sure seems he's had a good life...
My own father - his mom died when he was six... he was raised by his dad, an aunt and uncle in St. Louis, and his grandparents... fairly frequently shuffled inbetween. Once, his father (a non-drinker) owned a bar.. they lived on the second floor above the bar.. But ya know, my mother had the same pair of parents virtually her entire lifetime - and my father's happiness equally matched my mothers.. I guess that bodes well for my mother's favorite line "The secret to success in life is how you deal with Plan B."
I only wish for my own son, he could have made it into adulthood in a bonded family.. It gives me optimism though to see so many who haven't been dealt a great deck - yet they've become wonderful "card players."
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Howinthehell this is whittled down to grandparents, I'll never know.. I guess because my parents were married forever... and my mother's parents were married forever...
I hope you have special, wonderful memories of your grandparents.. (Which reminds me.. a chick I work with was raised by her grandparents... and she simply adores them.. and is normal as hell)...
Please..... think in your own brain of your memories..... here's a few of mine...
Grandpa sitting on the front porch swing EVERY summer night listening to St. Louis Cardinal's games on his transistor....
Grandma putting up St. Louis Cardinal's baseball calendars... yet, she would cut out newspaper articles to cover all the Budweiser/Busch ads!
Their fridge was ALWAYS stocked with boo-koo Grape Nehi...
Us three cousins riding in the backseat of granny/grandpa's car across town... normally somewhere around 23 miles per hour.. .hearing granny chastise "Now MAN, MAN, slow down, you're gonna KILL these children."!!!
Grandpa taking his hearing aid off at dinner time (the load murmur got to him)... and, since he had his hearing aid out... he couldn't hear his "pooters" so he just kinda wailed away... and it was the laughing tonic to this 9 year old's day when he did...
Fresh baked pies keeping warm on the oldstyle room furnace in the living room.
The 1950's version of Lysol kept atop the stool in the bathroom: wooden matches...
"Arthur takes his bath every Saturday whether he needs it or not." Granny.
Upon completion of the mass Christmas present opening... granny (who with g-pa lived on a very limited budget) would stand and pass out envelopes filled with money to every single one of us there...
Granny/G-pa's dog Skip. THE thing to do for older adults in Fulton, MO in the 60's was to "drive uptown" around lunchtime... converse with other retirees... this was a Monday thru Friday occurrence... You knew if someone was ill if they didn't make it... I swear to goodness, Skip, their dog (who we pretty much thought was dumb at everything else) would leave the house like clockwork every day at 11:45am to run uptown, and lay in their M-F noontime parking space until their car pulled in.
I have been blessed with so many good memories... I hope your eyes/ears have seen em too......
Oh how often do older folks teach us lessons.. A quick "grandparent-inlaw" story. Stepson was nine. We'd gone away somewhere for the weekend (I can attest, it wasn't camping... oops, did I say that?)... anyways.. my stepson's dad's sister (u still with me on that one) watched him. Lo and behold she'd taken him to get his ear pierced. I've got the coolest stepson on the planet.. and his mother was a damn good mother with him. Both of us normally levelheaded folks were a little put out by this... sooooooooooooooo... One holiday, we were at the house of the grandparents of my stepson... In their basement lived the 86 year old great-grandmother...
Hotsy-totsy me hollered at stepson... "Hey Denton... c'mere."... "Uh huh?"... "Why don't you run downstairs and see what Nana (great-grandmother) has to say about your earring?"... If you've played blackjack before, this was kinda like the good feeling you get when you've got 20, and the dealer is showing a 6... Denton (the stepson) runs down... a few minutes later I see him back upstairs circulating with the other snotnoses... so I ask "well, what did Nana say?" (Ha Ha, here's where I get my revenge... surely she was AGHAST by this nine-year old's earring)... "Well.... she said I "was right uptown now." Shit. I hate-hate-hate when others knock some sense into my gourd!
No matter your upbringing, I value you, and I wish you good luck as you take on life daily... THANKS for all the comments... They make me feel I'm right uptown.
2 comments:
Funny that your Grandad owned a bar and lived upstairs. Sounds like part of my life. Life After 50--I remember The Hill well. But I only knew my Mom's mother--Grandma Peters (Mathilda--but everyone called her Tillie). As long as I knew her she lived alone in 2 rooms on Virginia Avenue in South St. Louis. Her day was spent watching TV or looking out the window at traffic or people. Sometimes she would watch me when my Dad was working and my Mom wanted to go to the Cinderella Show on Cherokee Street for a movie. This was in the 50's when patrons were given dinnerware as tokens of appreciation. Anyway, Grandma Peters would tell me stories from the "old days"--she was born in Munich, Germany in 1881 and came to America as a baby. One story that I remember was about a baby left unattended by it's mother and an eagle carried it off. Another story was about someone being buried alive. To this day I don't want to be "planted." Grandma fell on the ice right before her wedding to my Grandpa and tore her knee up really bad. She was married on crutches. Back in those days I guess they did the best they could and put some sort of steel plate in her knee which caused her knee to bend inward and make her limp. Yet she raised 4 daughters. Mildred (Dolly--because she weighed only 1 lb. at birth, so the story goes, and Grandma put her in a shoe box and put her next to the wood stove and she survived)We called her Tante (Aunt). Olivia (Aunt Olie) was a character. Her favorite song was "A Good Man is Hard to Find," except she would change the words to "A Hard Man is Good to Find." Alma--such a devoted Mom--I could write volumes about her. And Aunt Hildegard--they called her Pete because they were sure she was a boy. Wow--I digressed! My fondest memory was when my Grandma Peters would take me to the Good Ladies' Lodge by taxi for lotto and cake. Of course all the women made over me, being a wide-eyed 5 year old. She was 83 when she passed; I guess I was about 15. All this makes me want to spend as much time as I can with my 2 granddaughters so they can remember something special about me. Thanks Vic!
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