Righteous Anger

You should never, ever, raise your voice to your elders. I firmly believe that. Well, except for the obvious stuff, yes. Screaming "Watch out!" when there's immanent danger is of course encouraged. But you do not raise your voice to your elders.

I yelled at me Grandpa Joe, um, a few times. Not that much, but it happened. Lord knows that it was only the supreme force of will which kept it from happening more often.

But the thing is, he didn't care. He was upset and that made you upset, and now you're both ornery. Yet he'd forget about it, getting beyond the moment with remarkable and inexplicable speed. He didn't see why you couldn't either. We'd each just yell at one another, finish the immediate project with subdued intensity, and he'd say "Let's get that coffee" and he was beyond it. Joe kinda figured you should be too.

There's something to be said for that. To be sure, that old man could have used a longer fuse. Yet what was over was over. We got mad at one another, it was done, that was it. Full stop.

What you had to get with Joe was that, he was Joe. A personality so unique that it came with its own aura. But if you could just accept that aura, he'd be all right by you and you'd be all right by him. And you would end up having a lot of good times together.

I suppose I should hold this blog a few days, seeing as he has a birthday coming up August 29. That might be a good thing to do. But why should I be constrained by the calendar? It'd never hold Joe back. So I can't let it hold me back either.

Almost Two Years

Mom's been gone coming up on two years now. It's amazing the silly things which pluck recollections from the back of your mind.

Yesterday I went to the pantry for napkins, just run of the mill white paper napkins, the last of a monstrous multi-pack I bought at a warehouse store in August 2022. I don't even understand why that came to mind, but there you are. I then immediately thought, Mom was with me when I bought these.

I'm not really super depressed, to be honest. Kind of melancholy, yes, and certainly sad. How in the world dinner napkins could bring something like that out, I don't know. But images of her being with me, holding onto the shopping cart for support, and all those other Sundays with Mom just came right out. I honestly find it just a little bit funny too, so it's not all bad. There's a sense of wonder why involved. 

Still, something as mundane as getting a napkin from the pantry has me missing her. So it goes.

Fiftieth Lottery Memory

Ah, memories. The Michigan lottery began fifty years ago.

They only offered scratch off tickets then, the kind that you instantly win (or generally lose) with, and few retailers initially had the state lottery. One Saturday night early on, Mom and Dad and us kids started playing the lottery, oh, at about 6 in the evening. We'd pony up our bucks, as the tickets were a dollar each at the time, and me Pops and me drove down to a store on Dix Road in Lincoln Park. It was eight or nine miles from home but the nearest place we knew that had lottery. He'd bring the tickets back to the house and we'd each scratch ours off. There were always enough small winners to merit going back out.

Which we did, several times. If I had to guess I'd say we made ten trips from downtown Detroit to Lincoln Park, me Pops and I, never having won more than a few dollars at a time yet enough to fuel our lottery fever. It reached the point where Dad and I had the only winners. And of course, we each won another few bucks with that. It got to where we never left the parking lot of that party store until our winnings and a little bit more were spent. I think we sat in that lot a half an hour, scratching tickets, winning a bit, going back in, then scratching those in the car. And all the while cackling like idiots at the absurdity of it. I rarely heard the old man laugh so heartily, so insanely, as that night.

Who started it I don't know. But you know how it is: laughter, especially uproarious laughter, often feeds itself. It stokes its own coals. I mean, we were both laughing harder than hell. We'd say we were done after these tickets, and then win three dollars and start again. We laughed until we hurt; laughed until we cried. It was just bizarre. Anyone walking by and noticing the two morons in the old Polara wagon had to have thought we were nuts. But for me and me Pops, it was a fun time.

So I haven't won the lottery. But it kinda felt like I did that night.

Facebook funnies

This is why facebook has a memories section I suppose. Apparently I had this short conversation with my granddaughter on this day in 2015:

My granddaughter and I just got back in from the softball diamonds, where we were having a catch, hitting, and pitching. At one point we had this exchange:

Her: "I want to throw a ball in the air and hit it myself."

Me: "Whatever you like, dearie."

Her: "Okay. But why did you just call me Gary?"

That does sound like her.

The sentimentality bug

Hessel, Day Two, July 2017

This morning I put on my ‘Green Monster’ T-shirt which I bought at Fenway Park, to realize it has been almost a year since I bought it. It will be a year next Tuesday that my son and I were there. Wow.

I saw too that my other son had tied together and labelled four small US flags, ‘2017’. These are the flags which he, my daughter-in-law, my granddaughter and myself had been given which watching the Fourth of July parade in Cedarville barely 18 days ago. And I thought something more like, double wow.

I thought I had sentimentality licked. I was afraid for years that I’d be too sentimental as I got older. For the longest time I was okay with things moving on. Life happens. You move on. You handle it.

But in the last three or four years I find it ain’t so easy. Oh, I’m not living in permanent melancholy. So long as I’m occupied, so long as I’m not face to face with some stark reminder, things are okay. Yet when those reminders jump out at you, well, they remind you.

Still, I’m happy at that. Fenway Park and that recent parade do indeed tell me that all is well. Sure, the moments are past. But they were great moments, and sentiment reminds me of that. It reminds me too that the day will come when we will remember, and sentiment won’t tinge our memories at all.

Thanksgiving 2015

Giving thanks means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Sometimes I wonder if it might help if we were to whittle that down to one or two specifics, simply to emphacize what we really should be thankful for. You know, find something small and specific as an illustration of a broader point.

We might say as a general point that we are thankful for family. That's a good thing, right? Yet how about a concrete example of that? For me, one such example is Thanksgiving 1984.

There were only just the three of us in the immediate family at the time. We had Thanksgiving Dinner at Nana and Paw Paw's, and waddled down the block home in the late afternoon, and hour or so before dark. There had been about a two inch snowfall, enough so everything was covered in a nice and clean white blanket. We went into the backyard to play in the snow a bit before actually going inside.

My wife and I began tossing snow up in the air, and Charlie followed suit as best an almost two year old could, all of us laughing and giggling. Then we found an old slat from an old picket fence and I made a snowball, while Gail took the piece of fence and held it like a bat in Charlie's hands. I pitched the snowball gently; Charlie 'swung' mightily with his mother's help. The ball exploded when hit, and all three of us laughed out loud. Charlie laughed especially hard, as small children can laugh, without holding back, in a more free spirited manner than us adults. We did it again and again, several times over, each time cackling madly when the snowball vanished in a spray of white. We did it, I don't know how many times. But each time was a laugh riot. It's a memory that even then, thirty one years ago now, I knew I would never forget.

It's a prime example of being thankful for family. You'll hear more from me involving everyone else in the family as time goes on. But this being Thanksgiving, I felt it a good place to start.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.