Eyes In The Back of His Hiead

One more person I want to relate to you before my story moves on from innocent childhood, is my grandfather who has had a profound influence on me.

 
I instruct you in the way of wisdom; I lead you in courses of fairness. Pro. 4:11

Blessed are those who find wisdom. Pro. 3:13

 
When our father left, we moved to the inner-city neighborhood I have previously mentioned. That is when Mother's father moved in. He practiced tough love, practical thinking and common sense. I was eight years old, headstrong and a bit spoiled. I had been "Daddy's girl" and put a lot of misplaced blame on my mother for him being gone. Children cannot understand the nuances of adult relationships in their small, self-centered worlds. I harbored some resentment for Grandfather in the place of male role model. 

He had moved in to tend to us while Mother worked. This man took on cooking and tending his three grandchildren while Mother earned a living for us. This created a form of role reversal in our home. This was a good lesson that just because you are born into male or female gender does not mean you can't take on roles related to, or competing with the other gender. I grew up with this as a fact of life. 

 
Everyone came to call him "Pop". He was respected by everyone who knew him. Whether you liked him or not, you respected him. His word was his bond. He looked you straight in the eye and shook your hand firmly. He was six foot in bare feet with massive hands, straight black hair and a hook nose. He was always squinting from the cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. Oh yeah, he had a firm protruding belly you could set a tray on but you could not call him "fat".

 
He was a retired house painter and was the first person to instruct me about primary colors and how to mix them. By the time I was ten, I could run a chalk line and cut a baseboard with the best of them. I took pride in being neat and never needed a drop cloth if there was a brush in my hand. To this day, I have the neatest art studio I have ever seen.

Pop was indeed an "angel in disguise". He saved all of us from lives misspent. No telling what Mother would have done without him. He served God by serving his children and their children. Before and after helping us, he had and did live with aunts and uncles helping them in much the same way. I don't know that he owned a Bible, but he never spoke irreverently about God and he did speak of Him.

 
STORY: Pop teaching himself to make pie dough is a memory that comes to mind. I don't remember if he had a recipe but that dough got the best of him for a long time before he finally mastered it. He would knead it and roll it, and it would fall apart. He would knead it again and again and it would fall apart again - or fall apart while he was rolling it out. I saw him, on more than one occasion, throw that dough across the kitchen. It would fall to the floor and he picked it up and rolled it again. "The heat will kill the germs," he said. That is what he always said when he was cooking. He hated waste - with a passion. Later, he taught himself to make bread dough that seemed to be easier for him - he didn't have to use that rolling pin.

 
I remember that he would eat anything, like cooked dandelion greens with fat back, fried mountain oysters and was very fond of sopping bread in bacon grease for calf brain sandwiches. Uugghh! No matter what was shot during hunting season or caught from the lake in the summer, we ate it. He detested waste.

 
He was self taught with the spoons, fiddle and harmonica. In deed, a great role model for being "self taught". He could cipher like a mathematician. He liked beer, occasional cheap wine and drank more as he got older. Pop had high blood pressure - no wonder. I wonder if the alcohol helped cut the cholesterol in his blood to be the only reason he lived as long as he did. 

Photos are Author, Brother Jerry, Sister Karen 
Circa: 1955 

 
This man put food on our table, turned all his pension income over to my mother, planted a vegetable garden, cultivated our grape vine and peach tree to make juice and jelly, brewed home made beer, canned, hunted and fished to put meat on our table. I remember picking buckshot out of rabbit and squirrel during supper. He taught us how to gig a frog, fish with a cane pole and gather mushrooms. He canned and fished in summer and hunted in winter. For several years, he opened a neighborhood pizza shop with pinball games and sub sandwiches. He mastered bread dough but gave up on pies.

 
To be continued . . . .

 This autobiography begins with "An Ordinary Childhood" posted Dec. 30, 2024

 

Mother Struggled

Mother struggled:

to raise three children on tips and her less-than-minimum wage. At that time, a waitress salary was not required to be up to minimum pay standards because of monetary tips that came with the job. Unlike today when the gratuity is figured into your bill to assure you pay for services rendered - or not, which can encourage laziness and a disregard on the part of your "server". Mother took pride in hard work and a job well done. I am certain she was excellent at her profession.

> As a child, I frequently wrote to my father with never an answer. I would literally beg him to attend dance recitals and school functions. He never came. Memories flood back to mind of standing behind a stage curtain and peering out at the audience to scan the crowd for his face. I just swallowed the disappointment of a little girl seeking the attention of her adoring "daddy". That undefinable bond that develops between a father and daughter that can not be duplicated with any other man in her life time; that relationship that sets the standard for men for the rest of a woman's life. A certain yearning has remained with me for most of my adult life; a small empty place inside never filled. That special indescribable relationship between father and daughter never happened for me.

> Fathers everywhere should be made to understand the affect they have on their children. I never shared my deepest disappointments with anyone; just swallowed them down deep and struggled with controlling my growing need. 

 

Father

> Dance lessons and my first dream of "what do you want to be when you grow up?" (answer: a prima ballerina), died when my skills advanced beyond mother's income. Any advancement was out of the question. Mother couldn't drive, we did not have a car, no money for travel, costumes or advance training. This was another disappointment to be swallowed that God would replace with an obsession in a few years.

> A prominent childhood memory is searching the sofa many times to find hidden coins for a loaf of bread and some milk. There was always something to eat even if it was just soup beans and fatback. There was a time when Mother had surgery, then months recuperating and searching for a new job. She applied to the state for Aid To Dependent Children. This was before food stamps. Once each month, she would walk with a neighbor friend, pulling a little red wagon to the fairgrounds to pick up her commodities. She was so embarrassed that she would try to hide under a head scarf. That winter, the heat bill did not get paid and I don't know what we would have done without the ingenuity of Grandfather.

> Lest this story take on a morbid twist, let me state here we were never given to self-pity. Mother often explained that no matter how bad off it got, there was always someone in lesser circumstances. Besides, Grandfather always had a childhood story available of how he had it worse: trudging through three feet of snow, barefoot, for five miles uphill - both ways, into forty-mile-an-hour winds and drifts as high as barns, to the one-room schoolhouse with a coal stove for heat. When Grandfather finished talking, we thought we were rich.

 

*  This "Book Blog" begins with my first posting on Dec. 30, if you would like to follow this story from it's beginning.  This biography is on going until the finish of the book.