Grandparents

Someone has told me that grandparents are like golf scores. Nobody ELSE cares about them. Yet as I took my walk today I reflected upon my status as an absent grandfather and upon my own grandfathers and grandmothers. Images of Grandpa Kieschnick quickly flooded my mind. He seemed ancient as he toiled in the very hot mid-summer’s day sun down on “the bottom” of his Lee County Texas farm. He trudged very, very slowly along side the mule drawn wagon. He was “pulling corn” which means he took the ears from the stalks and threw them into the slowly moving wagon. I was about seven years old, walking beside him and I was scared. I was scared that it was too hot, Grandpa was too old, the work was too hard. I feared he was going to die right there in front of me. I imaged myself running to tell Grandma.

He survived that, of course. The next morning he was ready to go again, but not before “morning prayers”. He took out that old well-worn devotion book, read very slowly yet loudly, the appropriate section (in German naturally) and then prayed in that long slow firm voice the prayer he prayed each morning. He took his usual noontime nap on the old leather sofa until the day he went to sleep for the last time.

I remember the wake. The open coffin in his living room. Then the funeral procession to the country church. Along the way we needed to go through several fence gates to get to the county road. As we went through each gate there stood one of his black hired hands. Each stood solemnly next to a black horse. Left hand holding the reins. Right hand holding his hat over his heart. Bidding farewell to the ”old man” on whom the whole family depended for livelihood.

My memory of Grandma K focuses on the humble yet proud woman wearing a gold tiara. It was her 50th Wedding Anniversary and she was queen for that one day. I admired her with a smug feeling for I had just made it through an extremely difficult yet important assignment. It had been my role as one of the grandchildren to recite for memory (in German, yet) some kind of a poetic ode to Grandmother - and I had made it. Grandma eyed me; wanting to make sure that I did not feel too proud of my accomplishment because one must always be wary of the sin of pride, but her smile acknowledged that I had done okay, and inwardly my heart sang!

A whole different Grandma K is recalled in her encounter with the chicken thief. Grandmother had noticed that the size of her chicken flock seemed to be diminishing. So she kept her eyes and ears open. In the middle of the night she heard a slight commotion in the hen house. She strode outside. Sure enough, there sat the thief cowering in a corner. He recovered quickly enough to ask "Which is the best way to Giddings?" (the town ten miles away)Grandmother's response(in German, of course) was the equivalent of "You, S.O.B. know the way to Giddings as well as I do. Just never let me catch you in my hen house again." With that the disappearance of chickens was over.

My Grandfather Doering died before I was born. One of my most heart (and stomach)-warming images is that of coming home for second grade and finding Grandma Doering in our kitchen. She was sitting, peeling apples for the very special apple pie she baked. For some strange reason my mind jumps immediately to the time I found her their calmly peeling away and then telling me that an hour earlier a 22-caliber bullet had flown through the window and by her head. She surmised a hunter in the area was not careful enough-but the pie would still be warm for supper.

And now I am grandparent eight times over. But my kids are strewn across the world. As I write they are in California, Connecticut, Ireland, The Czech Republic and Hong Kong. I wonder what will have replaced blogs 75 years from now and if they will have any memories of their Grandfather Mel.