Some reminiscences of my grandfather

At family picnics, Grandpa and his brothers would boil water over the grounds in the bottom of an old, chipped enamelware coffeepot, big at the bottom and small at the top. When the grounds started to pour out the spout with the coffee, it was time to brew a new potful.

For breakfast, Grandpa would fry bacon, then put slices of bread into the pan to soak up the grease, and eat the grease bread. He would tell us that we needed to eat grease bread to have enough energy. And, in his youthful days of multi-day canoe trips through the wilderness, that was correct. Lightweight, dehydrated camp food was not yet available then. When you went camping, you hauled in the bacon, oatmeal, sugar and rice. For breakfast, you ate the bacon, and the oatmeal, and the grease, and drank the lumberjack coffee, because you needed all the energy they could give you to paddle the canoe all day. Grandpa and his brothers had eaten many breakfasts of bacon, grease and lumberjack coffee on the shores of many lakes and rivers. I had my own little canoeing adventure with him.

Grandpa lived in a different time It was not just that he had a long past, or that his mind was beginning to weaken, as old folks' minds do, taking them back into their memories. Grandpa had lived in the past for several decades. In Dwight, and in Rochester, he was a local historian.

He was so wrapped up in his history that he would unabashedly buttonhole a stranger in the parking lot of Woodcock's store in Dwight to tell tales of the early days. I remember my father gently trying to persuade Grandpa that we had to leave, and the stranger's looking uncomfortable about turning away and uncomfortable about listening and watching Grandpa blink. Grandpa had a facial tic, blinking his eyes strongly and repeatedly.

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Grandpa's his light green, 1954 Dodge V8 car gave him a feeling of freedom and independence. But as he approached 80, glaucoma was robbing him of his peripheral vision. Grandma had never learned to drive, complicating the situation for the both of them. She did not let him drive at night, but she sometimes let him drive during the day.

One day, Grandpa drove the car  under a semitrailer truck. He totaled the car and suffered a head injury which hastened his mental decline. Grandma took care of him at home for a few months, but the burden became too much for her, and he went into a nursing home.

Cousin Nancy Vichert has a recollection from that time: she was visiting Grandma in Rochester, and when the time came for Grandma to visit Grandpa in the nursing home, Grandma said: "Excuse me, but it's my time to go visit Alec. His mind is going back through his years, and now he's reached our courtship, and I wouldn't miss a minute of it!"

 The last time I saw Grandpa, my father and I took him out for a drive from the nursing home. He had a circular scar an inch in diameter where his skull had been trepanned after the accident. As I knew him, he had always had a potbelly, but now he was trim -- the nursing home having finally got him off his diet of grease bread. He walked out to the car and back into the nursing home, but he didn't talk much.

Grandpa died in February of 1962 at the age of 84 years. The following summer at Dwight, I helped shovel earth over his ashes. I was wearing a suit and tie, not usual clothing for shoveling.

Grandma was there, behind me, crying. All the other relatives looked solemn. I moved the shovel mechanically, because that was what I was supposed to do. I felt nothing, except that I felt disturbed that I felt nothing. Now I understand. It was that I had taken Grandpa for granted. Part of me had died with him, leaving the nothing which I felt.

I had known his strengths: his sense of humor, his love of the natural world, of adventure and of local history. His weaknesses were much more evident to the adults around me.

There was more sediment in the old cemetery.

Grandma's ashes joined his there 15 years later.