Time as a continuum is difficult to grasp at times as we view the world and our place in it.
Family stories, those we live and the many that are told without us in them, manage to impact us as life unfolds.
My recent Grandpa Charlie column brought many compliments my way, and I am grateful. I will forever be filled with gratitude for all that one very sweet man instilled in my little world.
My great-grandfather and my dear dad were bonded over the tragic death of Charlie’s first-born daughter Helen. Their world imploded on the day in 1946 when my dad, her first-born son, stepped off the school bus and learned his mother inexplicably had died during a tonsillectomy.
At a time when that young boy needed his jovial maternal grandpa the most, the visits stopped. The light-hearted, loving side of life died for four children, and my dad became a working man at age 13 who looked out for his three young siblings. Their father never did recover.
Dad told me much later in life that Charlie never fully got his sparkle back until my silliness as a toddler fully blossomed.
“I looked at him one day as the two of you pulled a prank on your mother and realized, yes, this is the old Charlie!”
We were magnetically bonded. Grandpa Charlie taught me to enjoy farm work. He would place bales of straw in the dairy barn loafing shed, and when he said “go!” we would start shaking out a bale. He used a pitchfork; I used my tiny hands and a high dose of enthusiasm.
Magically, I won nearly every time. When that bale was finished, we moved together to the next one. “Darn, you beat me again,” he would say with a sigh. The winner at the end earned the prize of a bright orange circus peanut candy.
Grandpa loved root beer, circus peanuts, peanut butter pillow candies and me. He would offer me his index finger, and we would walk together all over the farms my dad was working.
“Your daddy needs a ride, come on,” Grandpa would say, and my mom would get me dressed for the adventure.
My three older sisters were in school, so I had my two favorite guys all to myself.
Sitting in the cab of the truck, we would arrive at whatever field Dad was working, and Grandpa Charlie would hunker down on the seat so that it would appear I was driving.
“Toot the horn!” he would instruct me, and we both would giggle.
A treasure trove of happy memories from farming with Grandpa Charlie has walked with me through life. I count myself one very lucky girl.
Next week: A story of Charlie’s childhood
