My Memories Of My Grandfather

Grandparents want to see their grandchildren succeed in life and in their school and in their sports. Many Grandparents like to visit their grandchildren and watch them play the sports that they are in, and they also want to see them do good in school. My Grandpa loved to watch me play basketball when I was younger, he loved to watch me doing what I love. My grandpa also was a really easy person to talk to. He was one for me that I could talk to about anything, and I knew that he would understand. He was a person that I could easily relate to when I was younger and a person I looked up to and wanted to be just like when I got older. These stories that I am going to talk are about how he taught me to have fun with the ones you love, to be teachable, and to spend time with people you love before they are gone.

My image of my grandmother, bev,is at our rustic cabin in northern Wisconsin, the sharp, rich, smell of fresh roasted Folgers coffee wafting through the modest house. She sits calmly on the couch, eyes glued to the news. Her elegant white hair, wet, rolled up in curlers. Her pink cotton robe laid over a comfy blue long sleeve with a delicate flower stitched onto the left side of her chest, adorned with crystals and sequins. As soon as I would enter the room she would jump to her feet offering me breakfast and asking how I slept. She was always one to care for everyone, she worried how they slept, if they ate. I sometimes thought she worried more about others than herself. She was always thoughtful and kind.

Grandma and Grandpa are probably some of the most amazing people in the world. I am really blessed to be so close with grandma and grandpa. Both distance wise and relationship wise. I don’t even know where to start. Between all the cooking lessons, rock shows, R.V. shows, birthdays, track meets, concerts, holidays, dinners, snakes, shopping trips and so on I have a lot of ground to cover in not a lot of time. I’ll start with the cooking lessons.

It was a Friday night sitting aside from the gym court as I watched two teams about to face each other. They were both great high schools and both in devision two in the sport of basketball. It was Hope High School (aka: Blue Wave) verses my school, Mount Pleasant High School also know as the Kilties. I alway hated Hope High School for their Blue Wave cockiness. That night in side the loud, hot, and sweaty high school gym, was the night of most intimidation. As the crowd cheered loudly for the Blue Wave Team, I looked up at the points differences on the billboard. Our coordination as a team was not bad, but it was not well enough to go against our other division two competent. The first half of the game us, the Kilties, were playing horrible. The second half of the game us, as the mighty Kilties, knew not to give up because we knew karma has its own fate even in the sport of basketball. It was going to be our second half of the game to score our points up and reach up to the conceited team know as the Blue Wave. We might of won most games but other games had been losses. During my high school year at Mount Pleasant High I played a game I will always remember as a foreign Kilties. Through the loss of this particular game it tough me that jealousy can over come a persons competitive side of them.

When I was a child, my late grandfather and I spent every summer on the bank of the river ganges. We would skip stones across the water, breaking the surface of incoming swells. We would wage Wrs, with sticks for swords and shells for arrows, like the most fearsome of ancient kings and queens. Idyllic. They never ended. Like the ebb and flow of the tide, under the azure and warmth of the indian skies, these days continued. My earliest memories of my grandfather were couloured by the times in these moments. Coating the wet-sand with the dryer sand grains on the bay, throwing clay-sand bombs from his biomechanical trbuchet. Twiddling his toes amongst the cool baysand and fiddling with his platinum-irridium vile. 20 years later I cant help but feel the same cool clay on the bank .

All my family knew that my grandpa Al was getting older and couldn't do as much. Over the next few weeks, he sounded like he was getting sick. He was getting slower. But because he is as stubborn as they come, he never tried to stop working. This all concluded with a life changing moment.

When I was eleven years old I lost my grandfather to a major heart attack. This wasn’t even the saddest part. The saddest part was that he was doing something for it, working on, trying to make it better. This experience changed my outlook on life. Noticing that we all have a limited time on earth, not knowing if we will live to see another day or not. Thinking back to the moment.

When we were together we were invincible, us against the world. I’d look up to him, not only because he was 6’4, but because he was my grandpa. I have clear memories of him picking me up from school, playing old school reggae music during our adventurous car rides. We’d always sing along to our favorites, sometimes turn the music up so loud the people in the cars next to us could hear it. When I would visit his apartment, the familiar smell of drywall and pennies would fill the air. It was my hideaway, my home away from home. My grandpa collected pennies in water jugs. He would say that one day they’d be worth more than just pennies. I loved it there, not only because he had a freezer filled with many flavors of ice cream to which he would often say to me “you can have all you can eat” but because it was our time to bond. For five years it was my mom, my dad, and my grandpa helping me to grow. Those are my favorite people, my role models. Being around my grandpa brought me such comfort and joy.

From a young age, myself and my papa were extremely close, I was his youngest grandchild and his last. My Papa was a hardworking man that grew up in the Gorbals, despite a rough upbringing, my papa is one of the sweetest most placid people you would ever meet, which is where he received his childhood nickname style. My Papa was a highly influential man who was a role model to: me, my brother and my dad. My papa was very comical, thoughtful man with a great character; this is why anyone could socialise with my papa because he was such a loveable character. My papa had an imposing life, he lived in Germany for a number of years with his wife and three children (My nana, dad, uncle and auntie) living on a farm with a great job, it was a great time for him, I remember talking to him about the farm, he would talk about how he would retrieve fresh eggs every morning from the chickens and how he would feed the animals. This great life in Germany did not last forever though, my papa would be involved a perilous car crash in 1971, where he would break his hip as well as many other nasty injuries, due to these injuries my papa would spend nearly a year in hospital which ultimately would result in him being let go from his job and returning to Scotland. When my papa and family returned to Scotland it was extremely difficult for him to find work, despite his injuries he found work in the ship yards, in which he would work the majority of his days.

Ancestors completely shape, determine and mold their descendants’ lives. Family values are rooted deeply in how a person is raised. Although I never met my great-grandfather, the way he lived directly affects my life. In Little Rock, Arkansas in 1924, J.C. (Jake) Red was born. He was number ten of eleven sons born to the Red family. After his younger brother, W.E. (Buck), was born, his father would leave them to start a new family, across town. He and his brothers would be raised by a single mother, during the Great Depression. To say he was poor, is putting it mildly. Dirt poor is a term that better describes the way my great-grandfather was raised. Jake was smart, athletic, and willing to work hard. Everyone describes my great-grandfather as the cornerstone of my family. His life was proof that opportunities are endless, if hard work and determination remain the central focus. Although, I never got to meet or know him, I have learned he was a very respected and revered man.

Most memories aren’t forever. Some you forget right off the bat. Kind of like when you forget someone’s name right after they told you. Yet, there are some that seem to last forever. Some seem like you can never forget them, and you will remember them until you’re old and grey. That is how the memories of my grandmother are for me.

Like a nonfiction story-book, my grandfather enlightens me with the adventures from his life and provides a valuable lesson through each telling. Quite fondly I remember him saying, “To learn is to remember, to forget is to lose”. There has always been one story, of which my grandpa told me, that has stuck with me and always reminds me to be fortunate that I do not endure the great hardships that so many face.

One of my fondest memories of my dad was when I was young perhaps 10. Dad had stopped drinking and still had the love of dogs and hunting. Each day he would work and come in looking like he had rebuilt the entire stadium of McCarther field. Big work boots, jeans that hung down to his tail, white working shirt, and a beginning bulging belly from too many steaks and too many half gallons of ice cream. It was not uncommon for we older girls to hear his beat up Chevy coming down the road from a block or two away and whoever was there, would have a large glass of tea with ice waiting by the time he drove into the drive way.

I don't remember much from my childhood. Little things. Bits. Pieces. Never the full thing. Simply flashes in the endless pool that we humans call time. The few memories that I do fully remember are nowhere near happy. I do have happy memoirs they are there somewhere, in the back, behind a door, locked in a box never to be seen aging. I didn't put them there by choice, it's like my mind is set to keep me on my toes. To constantly remind me that the world is cruel and that the only person looking out for you is you. It’s wrong because I’m wrong.

The oldest memory I have is of the blurry figure of my mother as she cradles me close to her chest and sings me a lullaby that is off key. This off-key lullaby is my oldest and most fond memory. A memory that fills me with warmth when I think of it. Those moments have since ceased as I have grown up. My mother no longer holds me to her chest and sings me to sleep. Most of the time she is not home, but far away and tapping at her keyboard as she works endlessly to provide for us. This has been a fact since I was three years old. When she first started traveling to different cities, states, and countries for work, I was wracked with intense feelings of loss for my mother who, even though I knew would be back within a week, was taken from me by an outside force. I would stand by a window in my silent house and watch as her car left our similarly quiet neighborhood. These feelings of loss have become dull with the years of exposure. My mother used to ask me every so often, “Grace, do you feel I’m leaving you too much?”