The Ancestors
My grandparents got cut from Gooder than Gold early on because there was just too damn much to mine from. Here’s a little something about them that I want out in the world.
I wasn’t close to any of them. I was the youngest grandkid on both sides of the family and by the time I came around they were just flat worn out, I suppose. I was not excluded, but they were full up on their kids’ kids and you know, last in first out. They loved me, of course. They were not unkind. My Dad’s mom called me Litte Miss Splendid and I loved it. It wasn’t exactly a compliment. In the little people books Little Miss Splendid is really full of herself. But she had a great hat and heels and matching purse, so I took the win. My Mom’s mom said I had “brigity britches” which is the same thing. So there must have been some truth in it.
My mom’s dad liked it when I sang and entertained around the fire when he and his wife would take their motorhome to the Carter Caves Campground. My mom’s mom’s prisoner pen pal husband liked my singing, too. Late in his life I sang opera at their sticky kitchen table and he cried.
My dad’s dad didn’t say much but when I was around 10 he gave me a pocket knife that was so sharp that it cut the hair on his forearm. He could carve animals in peach pits. I would use that knife to whittle sticks from the yard and eventually sliced my right thumbnail off. But that was my fault. He made hammer dulicmers and would chew tobacco and Juciy Fruit gum at the same time.
When I was sick at school, my dad’s mom would pick me up from school and I would lay on their orange and brown patterned couch and watch courtroom dramas with them in silence. I didn’t love the shows then, but I sure do now. Thanks, Granny Preston. She was a mud artist/entrepreneur that loved pickled vegetables and had the tiniest feet. She cussed a blue streak and was a yellow dog Democrat her whole life.
My mother’s mother, who was motherless at 6 years old, knew Colonel Sanders before his KFC fame. I can’t remember if that was before or after she left her husband and 5 daughters and drove a Vega Station Wagon to California to marry her pen pal who was serving time in Folsom Prison. She lived two hours away and was a Gemini Butterfly who could not be pinned down. When her husband was in jail again, for armed robbery, again, she worked as a cook on a small commercial river boat. One time we all went down to the banks of the Ohio River when her boat was due to pass by and we spelled out a message in toilet paper for her in the rise of grass where she would see it. So she was busy living her best life. Which taught me that I could do the same. Thanks, Granny Franny. Her name was Lillian Frances, and she was a poet.
All my grandparents were creators and makers and craftspeople and artists. My dad’s parents had a ceramics and woodworking shop and their own kilns in the back of the shop and a room for mixing slip and pouring molds. The women sewed and made quilts and rugs and baby dolls and you better believe they could cook. The men repaired sewing machines and radios and made rocking chairs and baby cribs and pocket games and birds with articulated wings from hammered Pepsi cans and glowing orbs out of soldered plastic cups and Christmas tree lights. They had their own rich lives and I was fascinated by them. But I didn’t know how to ask them to tell me about them and they didn’t volunteer much. And then, just as I feared it would be, it was too late to find out. So I keep their photos and diaries and ceramics and dark stained wood and hope that is enough.
