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Aug. 27th, 2004 12:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fleaI really need to write up something about my grandparents for the memorial next month. And I'm having a hard time getting started. So here are fragments:
All about food: in the house in Woods Hole, I remember Pepperidge Farm molasses bread, removed from the toaster with toast tongs. Portugese bread. Being asked if we wanted a glass of bitter lemon (I suppose they used it in a cocktail but I don't know what - we found some in the Kronig's on the Vineyard this summer and it's very bitter!) Being invited to have a "chocolate covered" (Eskimo pie) after dinner. Hamburger zucchini for dinner and the accompanying story of smart-mouthed Toby who when asked "do you want to sauce on top or beside" replied "underneath."
George I remember as a gentle man - when Toby told a story of him cursing at bad drivers on car trips I was so shocked! He was so intelligent and so intellectual in his approach to the world that I think he was a bit inscrutable to children. When I was perhaps 13 he asked me in all seriousness to explain to him what the appeal of rock music was - and really, he wanted a music theory/cultural theory answer, which I was unable to provide. (I could do better now, though I'm still not musical). He was impossible to defeat at scrabble, and threw awry a game of dictionary at Phoebe and Steve's in Brighton because he kept knowing every obscure word we could find in their weighty dictionary. (He is the coiner of a word in the OED - a scientific term - and right now I forget what it is - must ask Toby.) But not intelligent in a fierce or competitive way - more in an otherworldly, abstracted way. Yet, of course, very willing to roughhouse with small children. I feel remiss in my memories of him since so many are from after I came out from the darkness of adolescence, at which point his Parkinson's was pretty well advanced. I don't feel the adult me knew the fully functioning him.
Going to the beach, coming home wet and sticky with sand and sitting on a big plastic sheet in the back of George's Rabbit, then bathing in the big clawfoot tub. The magical day when we came home from the beach to a surprise birthday party (I was turning 4). Every time we went to the beach in August after that (our birthdays all early September) I wished for another party. Yellow cake, white frosting, gumdrops.
All about food: in the house in Woods Hole, I remember Pepperidge Farm molasses bread, removed from the toaster with toast tongs. Portugese bread. Being asked if we wanted a glass of bitter lemon (I suppose they used it in a cocktail but I don't know what - we found some in the Kronig's on the Vineyard this summer and it's very bitter!) Being invited to have a "chocolate covered" (Eskimo pie) after dinner. Hamburger zucchini for dinner and the accompanying story of smart-mouthed Toby who when asked "do you want to sauce on top or beside" replied "underneath."
George I remember as a gentle man - when Toby told a story of him cursing at bad drivers on car trips I was so shocked! He was so intelligent and so intellectual in his approach to the world that I think he was a bit inscrutable to children. When I was perhaps 13 he asked me in all seriousness to explain to him what the appeal of rock music was - and really, he wanted a music theory/cultural theory answer, which I was unable to provide. (I could do better now, though I'm still not musical). He was impossible to defeat at scrabble, and threw awry a game of dictionary at Phoebe and Steve's in Brighton because he kept knowing every obscure word we could find in their weighty dictionary. (He is the coiner of a word in the OED - a scientific term - and right now I forget what it is - must ask Toby.) But not intelligent in a fierce or competitive way - more in an otherworldly, abstracted way. Yet, of course, very willing to roughhouse with small children. I feel remiss in my memories of him since so many are from after I came out from the darkness of adolescence, at which point his Parkinson's was pretty well advanced. I don't feel the adult me knew the fully functioning him.
Going to the beach, coming home wet and sticky with sand and sitting on a big plastic sheet in the back of George's Rabbit, then bathing in the big clawfoot tub. The magical day when we came home from the beach to a surprise birthday party (I was turning 4). Every time we went to the beach in August after that (our birthdays all early September) I wished for another party. Yellow cake, white frosting, gumdrops.
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Date: 2004-08-27 05:24 pm (UTC)I have a very old (and probably thus much-embroidered) memory of reading "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish" at about the age of four with George. For some reason, in my mind this takes place in the nubby gray chair that Toby owns, which does not make sense.
I also remember being older, maybe seven, and wanting to go on the ferry to the Vineyard (just because I liked the ferry) and Dod was like, "Not again!" -- I remember being surprised to learn that other people did not like what I liked.
Do you remember when the Mah Jongg games started? I don't, but I know they started before George's macular degeneration got bad. Because when we played a game when I was 15-16, and he had to hold the tiles to look at them with his peripheral vision, that was a disconcerting change.
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Date: 2004-08-27 05:34 pm (UTC)Nubby chair memory could well be true, since they visited us a lot in Maine. I think the chair was discarded in the move to Cincinnati, which is, like, 12 years ago now. You need a furniture update, sister!
I played Mah Jongg the summer I stayed with them when I was 9.