My locally famous Roosevelt hating Grandmother was 21 and my grandfather was 39 when they married in 1919.
In their wedding photos she’s about a head taller looking like Inez Milholland, radiantly tall and beautiful in white with waist length coal black raven wavy hair, and there he is a head shorter and grinning like the a possum in a sweet potato patch.
His wife had died in childbirth delivering her third stillborn child the previous May. He owned two thousand acres of prime river bottom land, was a 1901 graduate of Weaubleau Christian College, which he rented out so he could run his watch shop where he manufactured, and sold, and serviced watches.
Her mother had died and she was raising her younger sisters and brothers and working at the local newspaper as a reporter and obituary writer what time she wasn’t a mule skinner on her fathers drayage line. Her fiancé had fallen in the Argonne Forrest, not one month before Armistice Day.
On their fiftieth anniversary in 1969 Grandpa was standing on his head in the front lawn of their rambler by the Hermatige School then waking all around on his hands, and my Grandma was inside with me and Mama complaining about all her ailments and she looked at us and said there should be a law they line everybody up and shoot them, after their fiftieth birthday party!
And my mother said would you shoot Bruce on his fiftieth birthday this May?
She said oh no, everybody but Bruce, Vanny needs his Daddy and you certainly need a husband like Bruce.
Then that summer, out on the riverbank fishing with his buddies, my grandfather fell and broke a hip.
Three years later Grandpa was dying and my father Bruce was in Plum Grove Cemetery and my first stepfather Hadley and my mother and all his family and Grandma were taking turns waiting for Grandpa to die from infection from an ingrown toenail the old stubborn cuss would not allow trimmed.
Nobody leads a stainless life, but if I make it to heaven my Grandma will greet me and say please sing for me, while I play the piano, you read my book to me, and I’ll explain Remunishuns, and get your girlfriend, and I want a Winston, and let’s the three of us go for a ride to the cemeteries and where I used to drive mule wagons using my whip. I’ll sit there with your girlfriend telling her lots of stories about you as a boy, while you grill us hot dogs.
And I’ll say on the strict condition you not put rhubarb in my apple pie.
What most young people never realize is how much old people give back when you visit.
www.cdph.ca.gov
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