Unfinished Object

When I sat down to write this it was my intention to share a few facts about him with you. But things kept tumbling out, so much so that it was difficult to stop at a hundred. My parents were still quite young when my brother and I were born, so the farm and my paternal grandparents played a large role in those formative years. Many of these are from those years when little girls are so attached to their grandpas.

1. When I was little his pet name for me was Sally-Ann.
2. He taught me how to hammer a nail without smashing my fingers.
3. He tried to teach me how to fish, but I was too impatient and too easily excited. More than once when the bobber disappeared and I jerked the pole I landed fish lips, but no fish.
4. He loved to hunt and fish.
5. He loved his bird dogs, especially cranky old Pepper.
6. He taught me what a cow pie was, and laughed at me when I stepped in them.
7. He had to work the well pump for me, the handle was too heavy.
8. He explained salt licks to me, after we went to the feed store to pick them up. He let me help set them out for the cows.
9. He looked strange in a suit, he always wore overalls. The stripy ones, not the solid. He was very particular about the brand. He wore them over a long sleeved work shirt, or a dress shirt that had fallen to ‘work’ status. He looked even stranger in shorts - heh.

10. He could build or fix anything.
11. He was a soldier, a factory worker, and a farmer.
12. He could grow anything ... once even a pot plant someone had given him. He’d no idea what it was until someone told him. He burned it in the trash barrel.
13. He had little use for animals on the outside, and a huge soft spot for them on the inside.
14. He saved a baby racoon once, named him Puff and raised him in the banty hen cage. Puff could pop a whole grape in his mouth and then spit out the whole peel. Grandpa loved this trick, and Puff was positively fat on grapes.
15. He drank cheap beer; Old Milwaukee, Stag, Schlitz ... all of which was kept in a cooler in the truck, or later in its own refrigerator in the garage as grandma didn’t allow such things in the house. I don’t drink beer ... but I may have one tonight.
16. He liked his steak well done. I was mortified when he ordered it that way at a restaurant where I worked when I was still in high school.
17. He made me a cedar ‘hope chest’ for my high school graduation.
18. He snored ... loudly.
19. I never knew him to drive anything other than a pick-up truck.
20. You were taking your life in your hands by riding with him. Of course as kids we thought it was better than an amusement park ride. My mom was not so amused.
21. He used to take us to the store for ‘pop’ (the mid-western term for soda or coke). He was really going to pick up another six pack of beer.
22. He did not get along well with my father ... I didn’t know this until recently.
23. He didn’t want to live in Florida ... it was a fight my grandmother won.
24. I don’t think he would have wanted to die here.
25. Food was best when it was fried down to shoe leather consistency.
26. He never ate the fish he caught.
27. Quail was another matter. Mmmm, fried quail.
28. He made mean biscuits and gravy for breakfast.
29. He bought us bottle rockets and ‘snakes’ for the 4th of July – back when such things didn’t require signatures or licenses.
30. He came to all my school plays when I lived in Missouri, though probably becasue Grandma made him.
31. He was notorious for injuring himself; cut fingers, blackened nails and the like. He was dangerous with power tools.
32. He made homemade wine once from grapes he grew. He liked it, but I’m not so sure anyone agreed with him. He never made another batch after the fermenting barrel exploded.
33. He was not a church going man, and had little use for those that were.
34. He built a play house in his yard, for my cousins. I was far too old for such things but I was still jealous.
35. In the spring when the lettuce was up, he’d take me down the row (bare feet in warm soil), break off leaves, rinse them in a bucket and salt them with the shaker in his pocket and give them to me to eat.
36. He did that with turnips too.
37. He was a bigot.
38. He didn’t believe that.
39. He used the word ‘nigger’. It was funny when I was a kid, and made me wince as an adult.
40. Once, when he worked for Zenith TV, he took a visiting group of Japanese men fishing and was stunned when they built a fire and cooked the fish they caught on hot stones.
41. They gave him a sake set with sake.
42. He never drank it.
43. He was a picky eater.
44. He liked football, baseball, and basketball. He would always wander off during family get-togethers and find a game of some sort on TV.
45. Tennis was for sissies. My dad played tennis - probably just to piss grandpa off.
46. In WWII he was part of a crew that went in ahead of the troops and built runways for the troop carriers to land on.
47. He sent rubies home to my grandmother from India.
48. They never made it.
49. He had sisters. I’m sure I met them sometime in my life, but I never knew them.
50. He coerced me into doing this:

51. He believed in spanking. And he used a shaving strap.
52. He and my grandmother slept in separate bedrooms for as long as I knew them.
53. When I stayed over he would get up at four and stoke the fire so I’d be warm. It made me mad because the noise woke me up.
54. He took afternoon naps.
55. He could whittle a chain out of a solid piece of wood.
56. He smoked for many years, only giving it up after a round of lung problems caused by keeping chickens and breathing the dust they create.
57. I think he was scared.
58. He liked to sit in a lawn chair in the garage and watch the world go by. Or watch TV on the back porch.
59. He didn’t have much use for air conditioning.
60. When my grandmother gave him a cell phone for Christmas a few years ago his first question was “Where’s the off button?”
61. To our surprise he used it often. It was the second thing he asked for when he went into the hospital.
62. The first was a comb.
63. The third was clean underwear.
64. He showed me birds nests, and bunny warrens, and newborn calves.
65. He taught me the names of trees and plants. I believe he knew them all.
66. He grumbled.
67. He had us help with slaughtering the chickens, but when he cut the heads off them he put them in a feed sack first, so my brother and I couldn’t see. We were younger than ten.
68. He always kept a garden.
69. He carved heart for me out of walnut and stained it dark brown.
70. I haven’t thought of it in years but the urge to turn the house upside down and search for it is overwhelmingly strong.
71. He let me drive his pick-up ... without knowing how well I could drive.
72. His hands were large and calloused, thick knuckled and stubby fingered. My dad has his hands. I have his hands.
73. He wore ‘trucker’s caps’.
74. He liked John Wayne movies.
75. He is in the Missouri Softball Hall of Fame. His nickname was Lefty.
76. The week before he went into the hospital he and a friend painted a fence for a neighbor. He was not a typical 87 year old.
77. He was very good to his neighbors and could make friends with just about anyone.
78. He was very trusting.
79. He whistled. All. The. Time. No tune, just a maddening warble that he was blissfully unaware of.
80. When he moved to Florida I flew to Missouri to drive his pick-up and bass boat back. My uncle drove the moving van...we flipped a coin as to who got grandpa and his whistle. I won the toss. Unc was undone after the first day of driving. It seems when he wasn’t whistling he was reading the road signs. Every. Road. Sign. Out. Loud.
81. I’m sure I learned my first curse word from him.
82. When he discovered I was into fossils he took me to places where road crews were blasting through rock so I could sift through the rubble for ‘Indian Money’(a fossilized plant stem that looks likes a stack of coins).
83. He got mad when we forgot to close the barnyard gate and the chickens got into the beans. We did this often.
84. He was not always a patient person.
85. He was a good shot with a rifle.
86. Whenever he went to see someone he always brought something from the garden or fresh eggs. If he knew you had a favorite he grew it for you, even if it was something he didn’t like. Turnip greens for my step-mom, and tomatoes for my aunt.
87. He was a good man ... but not a saint.
88. He complained about the price of things ... almost as loudly as he snored.
89. When a train car full of grain derailed near his house and he gathered it up to feed the chickens, plus a pocketful for me to play with in my plastic tea set.
90. He had a stuffed quail in his bedroom when I was little. One day the house cat turned it into a pile of feathers, he hadn’t much use for house cats since.
91. He cried when, shortly after my grandmother’s death, a dog killed both of her cats.
92. Her death cracked his heart.
93. My aunt’s death broke it.
94. He was 87 years old.
95. His death was not unexpected; that does not make it hurt any less.
96. They turned off the ventilator at 6pm last night. I knew and was too chicken to go.
97. He died at 11:30pm, his middle son was with him (I wasn’t the only chicken).
98. I got the call this morning at 7:00.
99. The woman, Shannon cried for him on her way to work this morning.
100. The child, Sally Ann, will sob herself to sleep tonight.

Posted by Shan on 05/30 at 10:25 AM
Plain Old Everyday • Permalink

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