StoryWorth: Grandparents
What were your grandparents like?
I didn’t get to have a long relationship with any of my grandparents-the first died when I was three and the last when I was twelve. What I know of them is largely from stories told by my parents and sisters and, more recently, from going through the family memorabilia and finding photos, letters, and other artifacts that flesh out their stories.
These were my mother’s parents: Murphy and Mitt. He was a carpenter who always resented being made to leave school at fourteen, a resentment that manifested in his proudly and whole-heartedly supporting my mother in her education. He was a very quiet man, loving and gentle. Mitt was more feisty, with a temper that made her relationship with my mother problematic, but also many fears and anxieties-she was so terrified of thunder that she would hide under the bed when a storm blew up. They worked hard all their lives, keeping their farm going and the family fed through the Great Depression. Mom was always proud of the Sunday dinners, where up to twenty folks would come around after church to eat with them, because “there was always food at Miss Mitt’s”.
A lot of what I remember of them isn’t about them, specifically, but about the farm in North Carolina. I don’t remember them ever visiting, though they did when I was very little. It was always us, driving south and south forever, until finally arriving at their place. I remember the smell of the sandy dirt after the rain, the strangely pleasant, rotting smell of the cold house where the freezer was, and the warm, dry smell of the old tobacco barns in the sunshine. I remember drinking cold Mountain Dew from a bottle, back when you couldn’t get it up north and it was the taste of summer. I remember picking corn and beans out of the fields and playing at the feet of the women shucking and shelling the vegetables for dinner. There was always work to do.
On the morning of her 50th anniversary, my grandmother had a major stroke. There was nothing to be done in those days-they got her dressed and put her in a chair at the reception while friends and family trooped by to pay their respects and she had no idea who any of them were. That was a horrifying time for my mother, but I remember Granny as one of the best playmates-we would play “pretend” and make believe that she didn’t know my name, or that she was a little girl like me, or that she didn’t know her way around the house she’d lived in for decades, and she was utterly convincing. She would give me slices of white bread with cold butter as a snack. In the morning, I would slip out of the bed I shared with my mother in the front room, sneak as quietly through my grandfather’s dark, shaded room as a three year old could, and out onto the back porch, where my grandmother slept in a tiny storeroom, almost filled by her big bed. I would open the door and shout “Boo, Granny!” and she would holler “Boo, ‘Lizbeth!” and I would jump on her bed and we would play while the rest of the household got up and ready for the day. One morning I shouted, but she didn’t respond, and my mother remembered being woken by my screams over Granny’s body.
I only have a few vivid memories of my grandfather, despite his having outlived my grandmother by two years. They may even all have been from the same trip, when I was five. Beckie was fourteen that year and somehow Dad got the idea of teaching her to drive on the dirt roads around the farm. She managed to put the car in one of the drainage ditches-she didn’t have much beginner’s luck. Dad tried various strategies to get the car back on the road and as he worked, shouting occasionally for Beckie to hit the gas, I kept jumping up and down and saying “Should I go get Poppo? Can I go get Poppo now?” Dad said “You sound like you don’t believe we can do this,” and I responded very seriously, “I don’t.” They both laughed and Beckie said “At least she’s honest!” Finally, finally Dad said “OK, Elizabeth, go!” I raced down the track to the barn where my grandfather was working and he fired up the tractor and let me ride along, holding onto the strap of his overalls as we chugged back to haul out the car.
On the long summer evenings the family would gather on the porch of the house that Poppo built, watching the occasional traffic pass by on the road. I was tearing around, probably being a pest, and Poppo told me to run around the house and he would time me. I ran and I ran and every time I came back to the big, broad steps, he would tell me my time and then say “Do it again. Run faster now,” and I’d be off again. When we drove away, I twisted around in the back seat to watch him wave to us as we pulled out of the drive and onto the highway for the long drive back to New York. A few hours after we arrived home, Uncle MG called to say that Poppo had died.
My father’s parents were very different. Raised in Kansas and Michigan, they married and moved to New York in 1919. My grandfather tried to establish himself in the financial world, but after the man from the next office jumped out the window in 1929, Grandfather decided it was time to get out of the business by a safer route. He spent the Depression taking an array of jobs-setting up distilleries in Canada, working on the Chicago World’s Fair-many of which kept him away from home for long stretches, leaving my grandmother to raise Dad alone, or with the company of her father, who lived with them for several years. She desperately wanted a girl, but miscarried many times after Dad was born-we now know that she was Rh negative, but in those days it was just a tragic mystery. She thought the moon rose and set on my father and would hear no criticism of him. They wrote to each other every week for more than twenty years-I have reams of her letters to him, filled with the details of her life, that reveal a surprisingly funny, money-fixated woman devoted to her husband and her church, but delighted to travel and find adventure.
She was a wonderful grandmother when my eldest sister was little. She would arrive by train with her suitcases stuffed with presents for her namesake and spend a week or more before Christmas baking cookies that filled the entire dining room table. She was a snappy dresser, with a certain elegance, and everyone was shocked when she threw herself down on the sled with Anne and played in the Michigan snow. She thought Anne was the most perfect child in the world and sent her cards and letters and treats throughout the year and begged in her letters for news of Anne’s health and latest accomplishments.
A year before I was born, Grandmother had her first major stroke. Throughout my childhood she spent stretches in the nursing home, returning to sit awkwardly in a green power lift chair. Her face was partially paralyzed by strokes and her gaze was glassy and unfocused. My parents would set me on her lap, where she would pluck at my clothing with long fingers, or they would tell me to hug her. She smelled medicinal and unsettling and her ability to talk changed as her brain tried to rearrange itself after each stroke. By the time I was five, she needed constant care and was placed in a nursing home about half an hour south of our home upstate. My grandfather couldn’t bear to see his “brown eyed Peg” so debilitated and never visited her there, but my father drove down every Sunday afternoon, despite the fact that she often had no idea who he was and would sob for her “Dickie boy,” and wonder why he didn’t come instead of this balding, middle-aged man she didn’t recognize. Visiting her was about equal parts scary and boring, but I always enjoyed the drive there and back with my dad. She passed away when I was eight.
My grandfather always seemed like a very stern, somewhat distant figure. He and my grandmother lived in a two bedroom apartment in Mount Vernon and when we visited my mother would make up the couch cushions on the living room floor as a bed for me. After his many jobs in the 30s he landed as the Executive Secretary of the International Merchant Tailors’ Association, where the main part of his duties was to organize their annual conferences in exotic locations like Miami or Chicago. He would also entertain visiting members from other countries and their breakfront-the same one that stands in my dining room today, was filled with gifts from around the world. The less-breakable ones were kept in the righthand door of that cabinet and I was allowed to pull out the sake cups and figurines and create elaborate games and fantasies around them.
If we were there on a weekday he would take me into the office on the train and I would spend the morning being given busy work-I remember using the porcelain stamp licker and drawing on scrap letterhead. His long-time secretary, Irma, was a very fashionable woman and she would take me out at lunch to Saks Fifth Avenue or Macy’s and buy me “a good dress,” just about the only clothing bought for me in those years of handmades and hand-me-downs. We would have sandwiches at one of the local lunch counters and bring one back to my grandfather and then my Dad and Beckie, usually, would pick me up and we’d go on an afternoon adventure somewhere in the city. On Saturdays my grandfather would swap his suit jacket for a cardigan, but I can’t picture him without a tie, even after he retired at eighty. It was shocking to find photos of him working the farms as a teen in Abilene, wearing nothing but overalls and a straw hat.
He could be a real curmudgeon-I think he never really knew how to interact with children except by teasing. The only time I’ve been stung by a bee was when he told me it was bothering a flower and I should squeeze it out of there. Another time, when I was five and we were out to an Italian restaurant, he was horrified to see me pick up the shrimp from my scampi by the tails to eat it and was loudly critical of my mother for failing to teach me to peel shrimp with a knife and fork. He never understood my father’s calling to the ministry and often criticized what he saw as an incomprehensible failure by my father to prioritize money in his life. When he died, at eighty-six, he left us much better off, financially, than we had been. At his funeral the minister kept referring to what a Brooklyn accent rendered as “Mistah Huntah,” so my last memory of my grandfather is of struggling not to giggle in a pew full of black-clad family.
And then I turned twelve and all my grandparents were gone.
This entry was originally posted at https://lillibet.dreamwidth.org/1315197.html. You can comment either place! There are
comments over there now.
I didn’t get to have a long relationship with any of my grandparents-the first died when I was three and the last when I was twelve. What I know of them is largely from stories told by my parents and sisters and, more recently, from going through the family memorabilia and finding photos, letters, and other artifacts that flesh out their stories.
These were my mother’s parents: Murphy and Mitt. He was a carpenter who always resented being made to leave school at fourteen, a resentment that manifested in his proudly and whole-heartedly supporting my mother in her education. He was a very quiet man, loving and gentle. Mitt was more feisty, with a temper that made her relationship with my mother problematic, but also many fears and anxieties-she was so terrified of thunder that she would hide under the bed when a storm blew up. They worked hard all their lives, keeping their farm going and the family fed through the Great Depression. Mom was always proud of the Sunday dinners, where up to twenty folks would come around after church to eat with them, because “there was always food at Miss Mitt’s”.
A lot of what I remember of them isn’t about them, specifically, but about the farm in North Carolina. I don’t remember them ever visiting, though they did when I was very little. It was always us, driving south and south forever, until finally arriving at their place. I remember the smell of the sandy dirt after the rain, the strangely pleasant, rotting smell of the cold house where the freezer was, and the warm, dry smell of the old tobacco barns in the sunshine. I remember drinking cold Mountain Dew from a bottle, back when you couldn’t get it up north and it was the taste of summer. I remember picking corn and beans out of the fields and playing at the feet of the women shucking and shelling the vegetables for dinner. There was always work to do.
On the morning of her 50th anniversary, my grandmother had a major stroke. There was nothing to be done in those days-they got her dressed and put her in a chair at the reception while friends and family trooped by to pay their respects and she had no idea who any of them were. That was a horrifying time for my mother, but I remember Granny as one of the best playmates-we would play “pretend” and make believe that she didn’t know my name, or that she was a little girl like me, or that she didn’t know her way around the house she’d lived in for decades, and she was utterly convincing. She would give me slices of white bread with cold butter as a snack. In the morning, I would slip out of the bed I shared with my mother in the front room, sneak as quietly through my grandfather’s dark, shaded room as a three year old could, and out onto the back porch, where my grandmother slept in a tiny storeroom, almost filled by her big bed. I would open the door and shout “Boo, Granny!” and she would holler “Boo, ‘Lizbeth!” and I would jump on her bed and we would play while the rest of the household got up and ready for the day. One morning I shouted, but she didn’t respond, and my mother remembered being woken by my screams over Granny’s body.
I only have a few vivid memories of my grandfather, despite his having outlived my grandmother by two years. They may even all have been from the same trip, when I was five. Beckie was fourteen that year and somehow Dad got the idea of teaching her to drive on the dirt roads around the farm. She managed to put the car in one of the drainage ditches-she didn’t have much beginner’s luck. Dad tried various strategies to get the car back on the road and as he worked, shouting occasionally for Beckie to hit the gas, I kept jumping up and down and saying “Should I go get Poppo? Can I go get Poppo now?” Dad said “You sound like you don’t believe we can do this,” and I responded very seriously, “I don’t.” They both laughed and Beckie said “At least she’s honest!” Finally, finally Dad said “OK, Elizabeth, go!” I raced down the track to the barn where my grandfather was working and he fired up the tractor and let me ride along, holding onto the strap of his overalls as we chugged back to haul out the car.
On the long summer evenings the family would gather on the porch of the house that Poppo built, watching the occasional traffic pass by on the road. I was tearing around, probably being a pest, and Poppo told me to run around the house and he would time me. I ran and I ran and every time I came back to the big, broad steps, he would tell me my time and then say “Do it again. Run faster now,” and I’d be off again. When we drove away, I twisted around in the back seat to watch him wave to us as we pulled out of the drive and onto the highway for the long drive back to New York. A few hours after we arrived home, Uncle MG called to say that Poppo had died.
My father’s parents were very different. Raised in Kansas and Michigan, they married and moved to New York in 1919. My grandfather tried to establish himself in the financial world, but after the man from the next office jumped out the window in 1929, Grandfather decided it was time to get out of the business by a safer route. He spent the Depression taking an array of jobs-setting up distilleries in Canada, working on the Chicago World’s Fair-many of which kept him away from home for long stretches, leaving my grandmother to raise Dad alone, or with the company of her father, who lived with them for several years. She desperately wanted a girl, but miscarried many times after Dad was born-we now know that she was Rh negative, but in those days it was just a tragic mystery. She thought the moon rose and set on my father and would hear no criticism of him. They wrote to each other every week for more than twenty years-I have reams of her letters to him, filled with the details of her life, that reveal a surprisingly funny, money-fixated woman devoted to her husband and her church, but delighted to travel and find adventure.
She was a wonderful grandmother when my eldest sister was little. She would arrive by train with her suitcases stuffed with presents for her namesake and spend a week or more before Christmas baking cookies that filled the entire dining room table. She was a snappy dresser, with a certain elegance, and everyone was shocked when she threw herself down on the sled with Anne and played in the Michigan snow. She thought Anne was the most perfect child in the world and sent her cards and letters and treats throughout the year and begged in her letters for news of Anne’s health and latest accomplishments.
A year before I was born, Grandmother had her first major stroke. Throughout my childhood she spent stretches in the nursing home, returning to sit awkwardly in a green power lift chair. Her face was partially paralyzed by strokes and her gaze was glassy and unfocused. My parents would set me on her lap, where she would pluck at my clothing with long fingers, or they would tell me to hug her. She smelled medicinal and unsettling and her ability to talk changed as her brain tried to rearrange itself after each stroke. By the time I was five, she needed constant care and was placed in a nursing home about half an hour south of our home upstate. My grandfather couldn’t bear to see his “brown eyed Peg” so debilitated and never visited her there, but my father drove down every Sunday afternoon, despite the fact that she often had no idea who he was and would sob for her “Dickie boy,” and wonder why he didn’t come instead of this balding, middle-aged man she didn’t recognize. Visiting her was about equal parts scary and boring, but I always enjoyed the drive there and back with my dad. She passed away when I was eight.
My grandfather always seemed like a very stern, somewhat distant figure. He and my grandmother lived in a two bedroom apartment in Mount Vernon and when we visited my mother would make up the couch cushions on the living room floor as a bed for me. After his many jobs in the 30s he landed as the Executive Secretary of the International Merchant Tailors’ Association, where the main part of his duties was to organize their annual conferences in exotic locations like Miami or Chicago. He would also entertain visiting members from other countries and their breakfront-the same one that stands in my dining room today, was filled with gifts from around the world. The less-breakable ones were kept in the righthand door of that cabinet and I was allowed to pull out the sake cups and figurines and create elaborate games and fantasies around them.
If we were there on a weekday he would take me into the office on the train and I would spend the morning being given busy work-I remember using the porcelain stamp licker and drawing on scrap letterhead. His long-time secretary, Irma, was a very fashionable woman and she would take me out at lunch to Saks Fifth Avenue or Macy’s and buy me “a good dress,” just about the only clothing bought for me in those years of handmades and hand-me-downs. We would have sandwiches at one of the local lunch counters and bring one back to my grandfather and then my Dad and Beckie, usually, would pick me up and we’d go on an afternoon adventure somewhere in the city. On Saturdays my grandfather would swap his suit jacket for a cardigan, but I can’t picture him without a tie, even after he retired at eighty. It was shocking to find photos of him working the farms as a teen in Abilene, wearing nothing but overalls and a straw hat.
He could be a real curmudgeon-I think he never really knew how to interact with children except by teasing. The only time I’ve been stung by a bee was when he told me it was bothering a flower and I should squeeze it out of there. Another time, when I was five and we were out to an Italian restaurant, he was horrified to see me pick up the shrimp from my scampi by the tails to eat it and was loudly critical of my mother for failing to teach me to peel shrimp with a knife and fork. He never understood my father’s calling to the ministry and often criticized what he saw as an incomprehensible failure by my father to prioritize money in his life. When he died, at eighty-six, he left us much better off, financially, than we had been. At his funeral the minister kept referring to what a Brooklyn accent rendered as “Mistah Huntah,” so my last memory of my grandfather is of struggling not to giggle in a pew full of black-clad family.
And then I turned twelve and all my grandparents were gone.
This entry was originally posted at https://lillibet.dreamwidth.org/1315197.html. You can comment either place! There are
comments over there now.