Stories My Mother Told Me

I recently shared with you a photo of me with my grandfather that was taken just a few years ago. The one above is the first photo of the two of us together, at least the oldest one that anyone can find. I'm just a few months old, and we're on the porch of the "old place." Within the next few months, we would move into the house that I grew up in, my home for the first 18 years of my life. I know this picture is a bit fuzzy, a bit out of focus, but that's how different the talents for picture-taking were in those days.

My mother says that this picture shows just how devoted my grandfather was to me. She claims he doted on me as a baby like no man she had ever seen. I love it when she talks about the time she found him painting the "new house" with me cradled in one arm and holding a paint brush in his free hand. There he was standing on top of a ladder painting a house with a baby of only a few months. She asked him if he thought it was dangerous. His reply was classic Papa: "Aw, that baby's all right." I suspect I was no bigger than you see in the photo above.

Years later, when I began my first real job, as a reporter for a daily newspaper, I needed to find a place to live in Starkville, MS. I had always lived either at the "new house" (they called it that for years after we'd moved in, of course) or with Papa in his home after my grandmother died or in the dorms at school (the university officials preferred the term "residence halls," but as we say in the South, just because your cat had kittens in the oven don't make 'em biscuits). I wanted to go apartment hunting, and he and his wife, my step-grandmother, came with me. I found a little house for rent for $250 a month. (I know. Don't even get me started.) The landlady said she knew she had to rent the place to me when she saw that I had brought my grandparents with me.

I stayed in that little house for about five years before coming to California to attend graduate school. Naturally, Papa came to help me pack everything up and put it in the moving van. He wasn't making the trip to California with me--that was Mom's job--but he wasn't going to let me leave the state without helping. My mother told me that first night of our trip west, when we had finally stopped to rest for the night, that he had been crying as we drove away from the house. Many times over the years, she would remind me that she had never seen him cry over anyone else.

Whenever I would call home, Papa would always ask when I was coming to visit. What I didn't know was that when he and my mother talked on the phone, he would sometimes say to her, "I reckon Joe likes it out there." That was his way of saying that I probably would never move back to the South. Mom knew how that felt herself, having moved to northern Illinois almost forty years ago.

I wasn't his first grandchild. That would be my cousin Debbie, who was born three years earlier than I was, and he'd already had half a dozen or more step-grandchildren from my grandmother's kids (four boys) from her first marriage. I wasn't even the first grandson for long, as my cousin Jamie arrived just seven days after I did. However, I was the only one who lived with him. I think sometimes he considered me to be his son more than his grandson.

I'm feeling a bit sentimental these days. On the night of his wake, after we'd all returned to my uncle's house, we sat around for several hours talking about my grandmother. My uncle's wife said, "She must really be on your mind tonight." And she was. Perhaps sometime I'll post about her. However, Papa's been on mind lately. I know it isn't surprising, but I've been thinking back and remembering all of these stories, particularly the ones my mother has told me about when I was a little boy. I don't remember them, of course, but I do have pictures like this one.