Brain Dead

62

From high to low, when and how would my life bottom out?

I got through the first month of my Senior year of High School pretty intact and if I had been able to pass any test in 'Advanced Math' I may have rebounded and made it through the school year. During that time the 'Civics' teacher had warned us of the up coming military aptitude tests they'd be having us do. He pointed out that while they would say and legally couldn't use the test to come after us for recruitment, that they always did anyhow. How could we find this out for ourselves? When taking the test put down the wrong middle initial, then see how many recruitment fliers and visits you get using that wrong middle initial...! And so we were rounded-up for the military tests in the semi-balcony portion of the auditorium at the end of that week and took them.

Also in the early Fall I went to various Radio Shacks trying to buy the lower case kit by itself so I could install it directly. The majority of the stores said that I could only get it as long as they installed it for an additional fee, but not otherwise. I finally found one at a mall about fifty miles away that would sell it to me plain without questions asked. When it arrived nearly a month later, I pulled out my father's old soldiering set and called my friend Jeff in Colorado and he talked me through the process of installing it as he had installed a third party kit of his own. With the chip in place and jumper wires attached where I thought they should have been, it came time to cut a lead on the circuit board itself that would sever the old uppercase-only video chip from power. Had I gotten anything wrong, I'd not only have no lowercase displayed, but no text displayed on the screen at all. Knife out, I made a gouge in the lead, closed the computer case and tried it out. It worked! Buoyed by this, I went ahead and mail ordered the 'Expansion Interface' and first floppy drive that would bring the computer up to thirty two kilobytes of memory and allow me to get off the frustratingly slow cassette deck. When it arrived, the extra RAM worked fine, the but floppy drive didn't work, it lit up and spun, but no data was read or written with it. I returned it and received a replacement disk drive only to find it had the same problem and the mail order company said that they had found nothing wrong with the drive I returned. My early boost from the lowercase kit had become frustration from having plunked down all that money and only gotten some additional memory for it. Working out the problem with the floppy drive would have to wait until the next time I was in Colorado and my friend Jeff could take a look at it.

I had scored very well on the military exams and sure enough I started getting fliers and invites in the mail to join various armed service branches, all featuring the wrong middle initial of 'Q'. I looked over the application forms I'd gotten and found it interesting that when you reached the 'sex' check boxes, the answers were 'male' and 'a female'. Apparently for men, sex was an adjective, but for women, sex made you a thing in the eyes of the armed services. Intended to be a passive aggressive response to having to take women into the military, rather than referring to women as 'women', the military took up referring to women as 'females', but by fifteen years later women had started referring to themselves that way, as well. When Star Trek: Deep Space Nine came out, they tried to point-out that 'females' was a pejorative, but once another fifteen years had passed, not only had women been routinely calling themselves 'females', men had even started calling to themselves 'males' completely defeating the original intent of the pejorative. After my not responding to their mailed invites in the Fall of Nineteen Eighty-One, I got a recruitment visit at my house. I don't remember if it was one or two guys that showed up, but they were very keen on signing me up. I assured them it wouldn't work out and I wasn't interested. They asked why I thought it wouldn't work out but I just assured them it wouldn't.

With November the first quarter of school had come to an end and I was entering a dark spiral, both emotionally and cognitively. Of the two math classes I dropped, I used one of the empty slots to take additional English classes, one of them with the teacher that I had for my second go around of 'Basic Composition' the year earlier. The other free slot was first period of the morning and I kept that free. I was admiring the wheels of a student who had been coming to school on his moped. He asked if I wanted to buy it. I realized with it and my first period free, I could effectively sleep-in each day and come to school late without impacting my classes. I took him up on it, working out a payment plan that would have it paid off by the end of the calendar year. The rest of the Fall I'd putt along to and from school with the moped and then again once Spring came.

Yet with the payments on the moped, junk food purchases, house bills and exhausting my savings with the unsuccessful computer upgrade, I realized I couldn't make ends meet with my part-time grocery store paycheck. I asked Van if I could borrow some money from him and he agreed. I was paying him back twenty dollars out of each weeks' paycheck and one week when he asked for his twenty, I thought I'd have some fun and say, ''I already paid you.'' Meant to be some teasing to have a little fun, after the first volleys of 'no you hadn't/yes I had' he abruptly said I was right, and I had. This stunned me and I tried to convince him I really hadn't but he was adamant and wouldn't take the money for that week. I would later discover that he had been carrying some guilt concerning me and I guess letting me have the twenty dollars helped relieve some of it.

By the middle of the second quarter the sudden hot spells I'd been having once a day since the end of my Junior year of High School had now started to occur a couple times each day. But as they always went away after a few minutes, I just ignored them as best I could and continued with my day as if nothing was happening.

I had started to completely shut down in class. Any class. I had entered this mental fog and would just stare at the floor as each class went on around me. The English teacher, who had been so impressed with me the previous year, actually blew up at me in class demanding in front of the rest of the students what was wrong with me? This barely got me to look up from the floor to her but I had nothing to say and she went back to teaching the class for the rest of the period. Once done and the rest of the students had left I was lethargically the last one to leave and she came up to me and apologized for having done that, but I told her that she was right, there was something wrong with me and I didn't know what. She didn't know what to say to that as I left.

In 'Civics' class my staring at the floor became the mainstay of my class participation and the only time I perked up was when I heard a student talk about how not all youth culture was against the Reagan era, take for instance the recent Devo song 'It's A Beautiful World'. ''For you,'' I mumbled. Perhaps stunned that I showed any life at all, the teacher asked me to repeat what I had said. I pointed out that the Devo song ended with ''It's a beautiful world for you. It's not for me.''

Toward the end of the class, we were to read Machiavelli's The Prince and Marx's Communist Manifesto. While we could show we had read the books by turning in a written summary, I opted for the verbal one-on-one question & answer to avoid the additional writing by hand. Despite having read them, when the teacher asked me about them my mind was an empty void. When asking about The Prince I could only come up with the vaguest of answers to his questions, prompting him to ask if I had actually read the book. I assured him I had.

He moved on to the Communist Manifesto and started with the question, ''Name a form of socialism mentioned in the Communist Manifesto.''

There had been another form of socialism mentioned in the manifesto? I panicked as I desperately tried to remember what it could have been. But again there was nothing there. After a bit of me staring at the floor while I failed to think, he prompted me again with the question and I apologized with tears in my eyes, ''Other than Communism, I can't think of another one it mentioned, I'm sorry.'' He stopped asking me any more questions at that point and said I could go. I again apologized thinking I had just blown the oral exam. I hadn't realized at the time that Communism was the form of socialism he had been asking for. But he apparently realized from my answer that I was just trying too hard to answer his questions and gave me passing marks for having read both.

By the middle of Winter I had taken up finding empty classrooms just to sit in and stare at the floor, it gave me more privacy than staring at the floor in the study hall area, I guess. But in this open concept school, it wasn't like I couldn't be seen and one time Van found me and asked what I was doing. I just shook my head and lamented how I used to be able to think, I could come up with pages of computer code at a whim and now I couldn't think of a thing. ''I just can't think anymore!'' I repeated with a burst and started to cry. Van put his hand on my back as I slumped over and buried my face in my arms.

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Happy Birthday!

57

It was typical that the plane back to New England would be on the Thursday before Labor Day as my father would often have that as his day off and he could pick me up at Logan airport, normally in the evening, and get us home by night. This time, though, the flight back didn't leave until after dinner Colorado time. My not as older brother had some leave from the Air Force and arrived at the mobile home for my last day or so, then after we ate it was off to the local airport. Nothing particularly interesting about the flight other than most of it was in the darkness of night time. Given the two hour time change, we didn't arrive at the gate until one fourteen in the morning. Taking my computer with me off the plane as my carry-on, I expected to see dad in the gate waiting area, which was a normal practice for people before the turn of the century.

But my father wasn't there. I assumed that he had been running a little late, perhaps having trouble finding the gate so late in the night. So I stood aside and waited a half hour as the rest of the passengers greeted their own relatives that were here for them, or just drifted past, until they began to trickle to a few stragglers. I debated the pros and cons of remaining behind at the empty gate lobby, and decided it would be easier to follow the last handful of people to where the baggage claim was, rather than wait another half hour then figure it out for my own, alone. I concluded that, given the lateness, perhaps dad's plan all along was to meet me at the baggage claim and assumed it would be obvious to me. He had always been good at assuming people somehow guessing what was obvious to him.

Drifting as the last people through the airport would normally have perked my interest, but I was just tired and wanted to get home to bed. Once at the baggage claim the serpentine belt was already running, weaving in and out of the floor space providing plenty of opportunity to stand at the side and grab one's luggage. With much of the suitcases already picked out, mine were easy to find and move to one side. My father wasn't here either. Eventually the belt stopped and the last of the passengers gone except for me. Being before the age of mobile phones, I saw a payphone nearby and went to it to call home as I started to wonder if dad had just simply forgotten about me. I made sure to pick a phone where I could keep an eye on my collection of bags still by the belt. Using the last of my change, I called and the phone rang and rang and there was no answer, so clearly he and Roberta must have been on their way otherwise one of them would have been home this time of night to answer the phone. Still, I felt I should touch base with someone just so it was known where I was. The call not having completed, my change was returned to me and I called my mother in Colorado, which at this time would have been past midnight her time. Her initial anger at me calling late was quickly replaced with stunned silence as she realized I was alone at the airport.

Her first decision was to have me give her the payphone number and then she would call me back once she got dad on the phone at home. A few minutes stretched into fifteen and I decided to pull out the book of science fiction short stories I had brought with me on the plane to read. I tried to start the next one, but my eyes really didn't want to focus, just close. The payphone rang after twenty minutes had gone since I'd called her: Mother was on the line. She had called the house several times and gotten no answer so she concluded dad must truly be on his way and just been held up by something. With the emptiness of the airport closing in, I asked if she could stay on the phone for a bit and keep talking, she instead handed the phone to my not as older brother and we chatted for a bit, but soon my mother was back on the line explaining that she couldn't afford the long distance charges and was sure my father would be there soon.

Deciding what I should do, I looked to my pile of bags by the luggage belt and even though there was no one else around, I felt they were exposed and ready to be stolen if I closed my eyes to let them rest. I found a strip of chairs in an alcove near the claim area and brought my bags to the end chair, allowing me to huddle next to them and try to finish reading the story I had started. Once done it was past four in the morning and I couldn't imagine being awake another minute or more, but at the same time I couldn't really imaging sleeping in this stiff plastic chair either. I looked at the floor with its dingy carpet with bits of gum and dirt scuffed into it and hated the thought of lying on it. Also, in this alcove, what if I fell asleep and dad arrived at the claim area and not see me? Then I realized that in the protrusions of the serpentine luggage belt was a carpeted strip. I walked up to it for a look and it was clean. Stepping up over the belt I sat on it for a minute and made sure I could see my bags clearly from this position and anyone arriving could clearly see me. Then I pulled my legs up and lay down, just wanting to rest my eyes while intermittently glancing at my bags; I fell fast asleep on my back.

I was woken up by a guard around five thirty in the morning and told I couldn't be there as the day's planes would soon start arriving. I got myself up and off the belt island, the echoing sounds of vacuums permeated the space as the cleaning crew had arrived. My bags were still where I had left them and, seeing the time, I went back to the payphone and called the house again. It rang and rang, but the collect operator wouldn't let it ring more than just a couple extra times. So I settled down in the chair next to my bags and entered a semi-conscious stupor. The airport came to life as the morning sun drew in from the glass wall. Desks which had been empty all this time since I'd gotten here finally had people, then the first new crop of passengers arrived and the serpentine belt again flowed. It stopped again once empty, then flowed again with the next crop of passengers. The various arriving people were all busy looking for their bags and took no notice of me off to the side.

It finally dawned on me that it was passed eight o'clock. I tried the house again, and again there was no answer. I debated about whether to call my mother given how early it was her time, but finally chose to do so. I was still at the airport?!? She yelled back when I told her. Father had gone from an ass who was late to pick me up to a full hole for having forgotten to pick me up entirely. She went back to the plan of calling the family home a few more times, then she got desperate and called Uncle Ronny and Aunt Harriet. I hadn't seen either of them in years since my mother had first moved to Colorado. I hadn't any way of visiting them once living with my father as I didn't have a driver's license yet, and once I'd received my license, in my typically out of sight out of mind fashion, I hadn't thought of visiting them in the year since. Though from my father's side of the family, they never seemed to take an interest in visiting him. They agreed to pick me up at the airport once they cleaned-up and had breakfast, both being senior citizens at this point, I couldn't begrudge them that.

Then it occurred to mother to call the ski area and see if my dad was there. He was and he was pissed that mother had called Uncle Ronny and Aunt Harriet as he was going to pick me up in his own time. He called them to tell them not to come, but it was too late and they had already left for the two hour drive to Logan. Just shy of eleven thirty it finally dawned on me that my name was being called again and again on the airport intercom, I then had to figure out where the nearest phone of the right color was located. As my flight had long since emptied its bags, once they had reached the airport Uncle Ronny couldn't find out what luggage claim area I was in as the airport had several and he was on the phone to ask me. I didn't know either at this point and asked an attendant behind a counter next to me. I told them and they would see me soon. Mother had told me to call her once they had arrived so she would finally know I was leaving the airport. My not as older brother answered the phone, perhaps mother had gone to work by now, was she working this day? My mind simply wasn't functioning anymore but it occurred to me I should tell my brother that our Aunt and Uncle were here to take me home.

They came down the long concourse to the claim area and looked worried. Rather than having us lug my stuff to where the car was parked, Aunt Harriet thought it would be best if Uncle Ronny got the car and met us curbside just outside the glass wall of the claim area. He agreed and left. Not knowing what else to say in the meantime, she asked me how the flight had been. I flat out told her that at this point I couldn't even remember the flight as I'd been up so long with only a cat nap a few hours back. She assured me that I could sleep in the back of the car during the drive to my family home. I brought my stuff over to the glass wall and we looked out waiting to see their car. Aunt Harriet was beginning to wonder why it was taking so long when then Uncle Ronny arrived in the car outside. I brought my stuff out and he helped me load it into the trunk, then I clambered into the back and lay straight down as he explained he had to drive around the airport a couple of times before he found the right lane to take to this claim area.

I lay in back, though couldn't sleep, but at the same time I didn't want to sit up and have them try to engage me in conversation as I was too tired for that as well. I just lay back facing upwards, the cloth surface making-up the ceiling of the car bobbed back and forth as we rode. Then it donned on me it was my head bobbing back and forth with the bumps in the road. Hours later, they prompted me that we were almost there and I got myself to a sitting position and looked out the window to watch the familiar main road of my home town flow by. I focused my mind and finally got out the words to thank them for picking me up. They told me it was no problem at all and, while Aunt Harriet still looked worried for me, Uncle Ronny tried to lighten the mood with his usual bright smile. Up the woods cloaked driveway, we pulled into the loop portion and stopped. Dad had left work to meet us, despite his telling them to leave my luggage on the ground and go, Uncle Ronny insisted on helping us bring it in. Dad thanked him, but couldn't talk to them now as, 'He had to have a talk with me,' and they needed to leave. As my father followed them out the back door, I slunk to the kitchen table and waited for him to return. He did, and despite the warm weather, he closed the back door and sat on the other side of the table.

He then let me know that Roberta had divorced him over the Summer because of 'what I was' and it was all my fault. He had decided not to pick me up at the airport to 'teach me a lesson', though I would later learn that he told everyone else that he thought one o'clock Friday morning came after Friday night. He informed me that I was disowned and that he wanted me out of the house and never to see me again, but as he was magnanimous, he would let me stay at the family home to finish-up my last year of High School as long as I paid the bills. Upon graduation, the disowning would take effect.

He was staying with his new girl friend at her house. She owned a restaurant and once she knew I was coming back, she insisted on having a belated birthday party for me at her restaurant. As it was three in the afternoon, I asked if I had time to take a nap on my bed. ''No.'' I was told as we had to leave now. Dad went to Pappy's apartment to let him know it was time to go, but as Pappy had thought we would be leaving at dinner time, he needed to get ready first. I remained sitting at the kitchen table for the next half hour then it occurred to me to use the bathroom and splash some water on my face at least. I got into the back seat of the car with dad and Pappy taking the front seats.

The next couple of towns away, when we arrived at the place, it looked familiar as I had glimpsed it outside the passenger window so often over the years as a child. We came in and went to a table in the back half of the restaurant. 'Lois' came out to meet us and we sat down at a table and her daughter joined us. We made our orders and I realized this would be the first thing I'd have to eat since the airplane. It took me a few moments before I recognized Lois as the ticket girl my father had introduced me to nine years earlier who had run her fingers through my hair and told me how it was just like my dad's. Now she apparently ran a restaurant. She tried to engage me in some conversation, such as how had the flight been and such, but I was still far too tired to give more than a word or two response.

After dinner, she and dad went to the back kitchen area leaving just Pappy, me and Lois's daughter. She leaned forward and with a smirk on her face told me that dad had spent the whole Summer going around telling everyone that I was Gay. I don't know if Pappy hadn't heard what she said, or he was pretending not to have heard it. I had no idea how to respond and just sat silently. Given my 'situation' I knew I was different, but I had always thought that being 'Gay' meant having same-sex interests. I didn't have any of those, nor any interest in any sex. I didn't have much time to reflect on this though as dad and Lois emerged singing from the kitchen with smiles on their faces and a lit birthday cake.

''Happy Birthday To You, Happy Birthday To You...''

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Parked

9

As it had always been during my life, we had a ski area. Actually, it was just a loaner as we didn't actually own it, but my father was the manager of it during my childhood and into my mid-twenties. As such, family members and the very rare friend would have all the free skiing they could want. Before I was born, my family had a home within a stone's throw of the ski area. A year after I was born, we moved to the home by the hayfield. While I had grown up with the Giacomo hayfield and surrounding woods as my backyard, my siblings had the ski area and its surrounding territory as their childhood backyard. I never remembered being taught to ski by my family, I just did, mostly tagging along the slopes with my sister, occasionally with one or both of my brothers.

While limitless skiing had its charm, I also loved the off season. You could hike the grounds in Spring, Summer and Fall. In fact, summertime had lift rides to the summit for tourists, sometimes with an art fair as an added draw. The lower slopes would be used for hang glider training. Other times, the buildings would be leased out for Gem Fairs, occasional Weddings, and other private functions. But the thing I loved most was the off season days when nothing was happening.

As my siblings grew-up and moved away there came the question of what to do with me on the days with no school, but when both parents were working. The answer was to have me either tag along to the grocery store where my mother worked, or to the ski area where my father would work. On those off season days with my father, he would first walk the premisses to inspect for vandalism, I guess. Mid-morning he would make the run to the combination post office and general store to pick up the park's mail, and for the rest of the time he would sit in the office and do paperwork. This was when I'd be left to my own entertainment.

The ski area buildings, when empty, were a ghostly place that would call to me. There was that combination thrill and chill of large empty spaces where people had once been but were now missing. Just me, alone. The vast outdoor area to walk and hike around with stilled ski lifts, occasionally swaying and creaking in breeze. Echoey interiors with locked doors, forgotten corners, some lit by lights, though most bathed only in limited light from windows. That limited light would approach a twilight during rainy days adding to the spooky atmosphere. I ate it up. In fact all my life I've been drawn to empty buildings just to again soak-up that vibe it gave me during childhood.

And then, of course, there was the ski season. Buildings packed with skiers, seasonal workers filling the previously empty back rooms.

In the early years, ticket girls would stand at various places around the park with a work apron which included many pockets for various types of ski tickets, each with the day stamped on them, limitless twisty ties to secure them to skier zipper tabs and a pocket for cash and a coin changer made up of metal tubes, each with a single denomination of coin in them that would be spat out by a little lever as needed to make change. While this method worked for the mythic Norman Rockwell era of America where everyone was polite and friendly, by the more jaded nineteen seventies, a ticket selling wall was made with little windows behind which sat the ticket girls with cash registers. The register receipts were the lift tickets, each day printed on a different color striped paper that would then be folded around a metal hook through the zipper tab and stapled in place. While the new ticket selling technique safeguarded against girls in the open being harassed or robbed, it also meant that all skiers now had to come to a common part of the ski area, regardless of where they found parking, and wait in lines as the girls worked through the confining windows. Soon after, the ticket girl aprons got a partial reprieve on busy days as it would allow the tickets to be purchased through the window, then stapled by cashless girls standing outside the ticket windows to save time.

The ski lifts were diesel engines with electric starting motors, sometimes in partial basements of the lift buildings, often with submerged metal housings next to the lifts. They typically had to be warmed up for a time before they could be operated to run the chairs. The Summit Lift was started earlier than the rest to first ferry-up the people that worked in the Summit Building, and the Ski Patrol who would check out the slopes and settle into smaller buildings around the ski area to be on the ready should they be needed. Once in a while my father would reach the park early in the morning to get a phone call that a lift operator would be in late and my father would do the duty of starting a lift engine or two himself. Sometimes, a little bored with skiing or a bit too cold, I would lie on the partially submerged engine housings to soak-up the radiating heat of the motors and let the vibration from the engine soften and sooth my back, and legs.

Grooming machines would run up and down the slopes during the morning hours to break-up any icy spots into little bits of ice that would be safer to ski upon, or pack down fresh snow into smoother surfaces so skis wouldn't sink down and be caught by the fluffier flakes. By late morning they were all back to the maintenance shop that served as their garage and also housed the tools and provided work spaces for the other mechanical items at the ski area that needed repair or routine review. All of these lift operators, ticket girls, ski patrolmen and slope groomsmen served as an extended family for me and my siblings.

Then there was the food staff. My father had first started out working at the ski area as the food stand manager, but as more slopes were added and more buildings built, father had become the park manager and the cafeteria had become its own enterprise. When fully operating during the busiest times of year, there were two fully fledged cafeterias, one at the first floor of the main building and one at the summit building, two smaller sandwich and snack lines on the second floor of the main building and the smaller original main building, and once in a great while a snack stand at the mid mountain building built on its own lower peak of the ski area. In the earliest years of the park, there was just the one lift that went from the original main building to the mid mountain building, but once the whole ski area had been developed and opened up, the smaller peak building was often simply forgotten about and served only as a warm place for some of the ski patrol people to be stationed.

And this was my home away from home...

The problem is, after a childhood of limitless free skiing, I could never imaging paying for it as an adult and haven't been skiing since!

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A Tale Of Two Grandfathers

4

It started simply enough, all was whole and working and then my Grandmothers died within a few years of each other around the time of my birth. In fact I never had any memory of them. In the case of my maternal grandfather, Bumpa, as he lived in a nearby town my mother took up the task of running over to his house each day to check on him and make sure he was getting along all right. In the case of my paternal grandfather, Pappy, things didn't work out as well.

Visiting Bumpa's house was one of the things I looked forward to. As one lives, often there comes a time when you've plateaued technologically about mid-life. Sure you might still get the newest-fangled black rotary dial phone, but the majority of the items in your home reflect the age of technology when you were around your forties and fifties. This was true with Bumpa's house as you entered the front door and instead of the nineteen sixties, you were back to the nineteen forties. No automated washing machine, but an open barrel washer with wringing rollers above it. No obvious television, but a large decoratively wood-housed radio sat as furniture to one side of the living room. The dining room held a circular table and chair set that mother told me Bumpa had handmade in his younger years. He had a few family photos all black & white whereas my family's home had a mix of black & white and color pictures.

A single floor house with a full basement, the basement was reached by very shallow, steep steps that were scarey to climb up and down given my small child feet. It was easier to climb down them backwards than facing forward. In the basement was a collection of wood working tools and some yard tools as well which could be taken out by a side door to the outside. Lit only by a couple of yellowish-orange glowing light bulbs, it was a mysterious place, yet seemingly safe. In my adult years I would learn about the subconscious comfort of 'warm' lighting versus the implicit discomfort of 'cold' lighting so perhaps it was that amber glow of the old style light bulbs that made it seem safe.

And then there was Bumpa himself, a huge man, mostly bald, with black rim practical glasses, and fingers of various lengths. Given my height at the time, his hands and fingers were what I could best see of him when standing up close. Some fingers only had two knuckles, one had just one. All the shorter fingers and one regular length finger lacked nails. When I asked mother about them, she explained that as part of his life working in mills and woodworking, he'd lost some of his finger tips. Deep voiced and long legged, he was like the giant of Jack and the Bean Stalk stories, but kind and gentle.

Pappy, seemed a foot shorter with a higher pitched voice. More like Batman's T.V. Commissioner in appearance than Jack's giant, he had been a Boston banker who had bought a vacation home in northern New England and eventually retired there by the nineteen fifties. During Pappy's final years of work, my father had spent his teenage years living at the vacation home full-time. Once retired, he and my paternal grandmother had become snowbirds, living in New England during the Summers, in Florida during the Winters. I don't remember his New England home at all, though I heard it was a coveted lakeside home. Soon after my paternal grandmother died that home was sold and, as my mother kept an eye on my maternal grandfather, my father decided to keep an eye on my paternal grandfather by having him move in with us at our family home... kind of.

With his money from the sale of his lakeside home, Pappy had an apartment built onto the side of our house, effectively a small house built onto ours. His apartment came with an upside for the kids, next to the full basement of our house was put in a full basement for his apartment. Not needed to store tools or yard equipment, it became a teenage playroom of sorts for my two older brothers as a ping-pong table was put in place, other outdoor gaming equipment would be stored there as well. Though unheated, it was still warm enough to use from March through October as my brothers would be down there entertaining friends or sometimes entertaining themselves with games of ping-pong or just escaping the notice of our parents.

Pappy's apartment was placed just under my early childhood bedroom window. Though I have no memories of it being built, I've had a lifelong fascination with other buildings being constructed so perhaps the exposure of his place being put-up seeded a lifetime's interest for me.

When spending Spring through Fall with us, Pappy's time would settle into a routine pattern of keeping to himself in the morning, perhaps a quick visit with me or my siblings by late morning or early afternoon, then joining us for supper and nighttime T.V. viewing. This put a bit of a cramp into the family as viewing would now have to include Pappy's interests, but this just resulted in my brothers spending more time playing basket ball in the dirt driveway in front of the detached garage, or in my eldest brother's bedroom listening to music and talking about things that couldn't be talked about in front of the parents.

T.V. viewing time with Pappy would also be punctuated by a new tradition: His evening shot of Moxie. Poured into a small juice-sized glass due to its strength, I would leap at the chance to carry the glass from the kitchen to the living room and hand it to Pappy where he would savor it for the next hour in small sips. As a reward for this task, I was allowed to have a shot glass full myself. It had all the flavor and charm of a liquorish flavored cough syrup in carbonated water. For some reason, few of my other family members were interested in this precious liquid.

My father would use part of his vacation time to join Pappy on his drives to Florida in the Fall and back in the Spring. I assume he flew back based on later experience, but I don't specifically remember talk of how he got home.

And as my mother got to look after her father during morning visits to his house, work a half day when I was in Nursery school and Kindergarten, stay on top of all the household needs and make the evening family dinner for us all. In turn my father got to look after Pappy by having my mother wait on him hand and foot during nighttime television that would sometimes include the late night shows.

The truest tear in the unraveling of my family had taken place.

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