My grandma was a real grandma, she was pudgy, toothless, and white headed and she only had four different dresses and they all pretty much looked alike. She sure could cook though; she made the best fried chicken or fried catfish and cream pies. Every meal was served with homemade jelly, fresh sliced tomatoes, and love. I remember the smells of her cooking so well.
For some reason, I don’t know exactly why, but my grandmother breast fed me, right along with her own baby, so I bonded with my grandmother. I guess for a while, I sort of had two moms and a sister “sort of” because Kari Jo and I were so close in age and I was always with my grandparents. So it was like we were sisters and I guess for a very short time, I had two men in my life, my dad, “who was a teenager” and my grandpa. My dad was young and wild and he wasn’t really around much even back then. My grandfather was a very sad person, he was very ill. As long as I can remember, he didn’t have any teeth, and walked using crutches. He had worked for the mines back when they sustained the area and he had fallen down a fifty foot mine shaft and had permanently injured himself. He had one foot that just hung there and didn’t function.
Of course back then and especially there, no one was libel for anything like they are today. No one took care of him, or gave him disability. I think he got social security of about two hundred and fifty dollars a month and that was it. Any additional income he had at all was from “horse trading”. That’s not actually trading horses, but everything else you could think of, such as guns, boat motors, trailers, washers, or any thing else that you could trade, or fix and sell. Besides trading, he was an excellent fisherman, gardener, and he hunted squirrel, rabbit and deer.
My grandpa drove an old pick up. He called it his “pick em up truck”. It had a clutch and he used his crutch just like a leg. He used it to push in the clutch on the truck, or to push the boat off the bank of the river, or to reach up and shake down cherries from a tree with. He was very resourceful, he had to be, he had no choice. I remember him using his crutch to shoot his rifle. He would use it to balance the gun on and to sight in on something, and he did all of it as well as any man that had two functioning arms and legs could. He was a very interesting man; he had ridden a motorcycle in one of those metal balls at the carnival, back when he was younger. But he wasn’t perfect, he could curse up a storm but it never bothered me. I loved my grandma and grandpa very much.
Thank god my grandparents were there because my mom was still a child herself and she didn’t want to be tied to me. And because they had a toddler of there own. It was no big deal that I was there all of the time. My poor grandparents, by the time they were in their mid forties. They both had gray hair and no teeth. They were old beyond there years, dirt poor and had two little babies to take care of to boot.
But my mom was going to change all of that. She was on her way to making it three little babies to boot. Yep! At nineteen, she had my little brother David.
After she had David, she kept me at home with her allot more, so I could help out. I remember when I was only three. She told me to go and get her a diaper for the baby. “We of course didn’t use pampers back then”. I went to the other room and got her a diaper. I brought it out eager to please, proudly handing her the diaper. She looked at the diaper and then slapped me across the face. She said, “Go get me another diaper. This one has a hole in it this should be used for a dish rag. I walked back to the other room, my enthusiasm gone, my ear hurting, but my heart was hurting much worse than my ear. I got another diaper, returned it to my mom who yanked it out of my hand without any kindness.
In my mother’s eyes, her life was stifling, and she saw us as the ties that bind. And as I would realize later, I was the first tie. The rest were incidental.
By now my mom was twenty, with two small children. But she had bigger problems than that. My dad “now twenty two” had been imprisoned for steeling a car and taking a minor across the state line and blowing up a gas station, or something like that. Anyway he was sent to the state penitentiary.
My mom divorced my dad, while he was in “Big Mac” the state Pen. Then we were back to just the three of us. I was always in charge of David, because my mom had a new job. She worked really hard trying to find us another daddy, one that was not in prison. Well! Before I was three and David was one. She found us one! From what I remember and what I have been told. He was a very nice man, and oh so steady. He had a steady pay-check; he was in the Air force so he had benefits too. And best of all she seemed happy with him, and he truly seemed to care about David and I. Things were looking up.
Of course I was still getting those diapers, only now I was changing them as well. It was a good thing. I was going to need the practice because before long my mom and my new daddy were going to have a new baby of their own.
Who knows how things might have turned out if things had been different. But we only get what is, not what could have been. Bill, the good daddy, the providing daddy, the loving daddy, was coming home from the Air force base one night. It was a sixty mile drive, and he was driving two of his buddies home to there families for a three day weekend. They had just come off of a forty eight hour guard duty stint. They stopped and had a beer on the way home. The lack of sleep, the beer and the sixty mile drive would prove fatal. He wrecked the car and was killed instantly.
They said that he fell asleep at the wheel. He was thrown from the car and hit a construction barrel head first. It was a closed casket funeral. I remember it well. It was a military funeral. They played taps, and folded a big flag into a triangle and handed it to my mom. They shot off seven guns, three times and every time they did, my mom would jump. I remember that so vividly.
I was sad, even though I did not realize the finality of what had happened. I knew that I didn’t see the nice daddy anymore.
So now we were three again, with one on the way. My mom didn’t have any good luck. She had asthma real bad and ended up in the hospital for the last few months of her pregnancy. While mom was in the hospital, David and I got to go back and live with grandma and grandpa. So I was happy at least. I was with Kari Jo again and grandma looked after David so I could just be a kid. I was always happiest when I was with grandma and grandpa.
Eventually my mom had my little brother. She named him William, after his dead daddy, although I would always call him Billy.
She got out of the hospital and took David and me, back with her and away from grandma and grandpa. I was needed more than ever now because that stack of diapers was getting bigger and bigger.
