ALAN writes:

My maternal grandmother enjoyed crocheting and playing cards.  During intense thunderstorms, she would walk from room to room, carrying a lighted candle and praying.  I have only one picture in which she is smiling—at the sight of her infant grandson being placed on a pony at a school picnic in 1950.  She loved watching Western movies and TV shows because she understood and valued the iron moral code upheld in those Westerns.  When I was a toddler, she held me on her lap as we watched the weekly adventures of “The Lone Ranger.”  She died when I was seven years old.

I agree with Lydia Sherman’s remarks about the neglect of grandparents and the disintegration of American families.

My paternal grandparents died years before I was born.  I knew my maternal grandparents, but not nearly as well as I could and should have known them.  My grandfather worked for a printing company and my grandmother was a housewife.  When I was a boy they walked with us to Sunday morning Mass at our Catholic church, two blocks from where we lived.  Both of them came from large families.  One of my grandfather’s nephews and his wife had twelve children—six of one and half a dozen of the other. 

I have a few black-and-white snapshots that show my grandparents at the home of his sister and brother-in-law in 1927 in a small coal mining town in Southern Illinois.  They went there every summer at the time of the church picnic, from the 1920s through the early 1950s.  I have only the dimmest memory of being taken there on such occasions in 1951-’52.  People socialized during the day on the church grounds.  In the evenings, quilts were displayed and rows of lights were strung above picnic tables as people played bingo.

In 2004 one of my cousins drove me to the two-story frame house where my great aunt had lived.  It had been well cared for and looked pretty much as it did in 1927.  The coal mines, within walking distance from that house, had long since been closed.

My grandfather lived another twelve years after my grandmother died.  He was old enough to remember the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 and World War I, but I don’t remember him ever talking about them.  He never talked a lot about anything. When his children were little, he would take them on Sunday afternoon streetcar rides out to Creve Coeur Lake, where they fished for crawdads.  He enjoyed fishing.  He never smoked.  He never drank anything stronger than beer.

In his retirement years, he would go out walking during the day to meet his friends at corner taverns.  In St. Louis in the 1950s, there were corner taverns by the hundreds.  When I was a boy, sometimes he took me with him and would buy me a bottle of 7-Up as I sat there on a barstool, hopelessly bored by their conversations.  In recent years, I went back to that neighborhood and walked past some of those corner taverns to see them once again, to pause there and try to remember how it felt to be there in the 1950s.  Most of them were closed or boarded-up.

He enjoyed reading the daily newspapers (at one time there were four dailies in St. Louis).  He enjoyed listening to baseball games on the olive-green radio that sat on top of our icebox.  He enjoyed watching “Sea Hunt” on television.

My grandparents never drove an automobile in their lives, or wanted to.  When they rode in one, they did not expect to be entertained during the ride.  They were happy to arrive safely at their destination.  They would be appalled at the driving habits of American motorists today.

So far as I know, they never travelled more than 130 miles from where they were born.  But they were content.  Not being content in the midst of material comfort such as that Americans had achieved by the 1950s would have been unthinkable to them.

Certain moments remain in one’s memory throughout life.

When I was a boy, the nickname “Davy” was bestowed upon me because I was a fan of the Walt Disney “Davy Crockett” TV series in the 1950s and wore a “Davy Crockett hat” when playing in our back yard.

One day in 1963 I was sitting on the floor in our living room while playing a stack of 45-rpm records.  Some were rock and roll songs and others were ballads.  At that age, I enjoyed the records of Connie Francis, Bobby Darin, Brenda Lee, Bobby Vee, Ricky Nelson, and others like them.  My grandfather did not like “rock and roll music”.  But on this particular day, he sat there in an easy chair while I played my records.  If he had been annoyed, he would have got up and left the room.  But he didn’t.  He stayed there, not saying a word.

In the moment of silence after a certain record ended, I was astonished to hear him say to me, “That was a good one, Davy.”  I had never expected him to say anything.  He seldom did.  And he never said anything about the records I played.

As I recall, I was too surprised at that moment to say anything in response.  I merely looked over at him and nodded my head to indicate I agreed with what he said.  I was astonished that a song I liked had also impressed him favorably enough to say even those few words.  I remember feeling an unusual kind of contentment at that moment.

The record I had played was the lovely ballad “The End of the World”, sung by country music entertainer Skeeter Davis, whose real name was Mary Francis Penick.  It was not a lover’s lament.  It was composed by a girl to express what she felt after the death of her father.  I loved the record when I first heard it.  And because her recording brought an old man and his grandson together on that day in 1963, Skeeter Davis earned a place in my heart.  “The End of the World” brought her worldwide fame and gold records.  She died from cancer at age 72 in 2004.

In recent years I have stood often at the gravesite of my grandparents in a Catholic cemetery less than a mile from where I write these words, apologizing to them silently and feeling appalled and ashamed at how little I knew them and how much I owed them.

Please follow and like us: