We’ve all seen the phenomenon of old people giving up on keeping up with the modern world. This happens after they no longer have to work or watch after their children. With grandparents this happens right when you’re born. That is usually when most people can rest assured that they have finished raising their child.
So most kids don’t see their grandparents taking on responsibilities or dealing with any significant problems. This lead me to severely underestimate my grandparents when I was younger.
Looking back on it now I realize just how stupid it was of me to think that way. These were Jewish people that lived through World War II. They ran away from villages that were bombed by Nazis. They survived fucking Nazi air raids. How could I think they couldn’t teach me anything?
So when I was around ten I was walking home with my grandpa who was also walking his bicycle. Some teenagers came by and asked if they could buy his bike for $1. I translated this back to grandpa. He replied back in Russian, “tell them to go fuck themselves.” I didn’t translate this back. I just told them he would not sell the bike.
I later learned that he could fix anything. Even the more modern stuff that didn’t exist when he worked as a mechanic in Russia. He had no idea how to use a washing machine, but every time ours broke down he would make it work again. He knew the fundamentals of how things were assembled. He knew how to assemble furniture without instructions. Even if he never saw some kind of bolt before he could look at it and figure out what it would be used for.
He would tell me stories about how people would break boulders by freezing water. He was pretty much an engineering nerd, and for most of my life I didn’t know it.
My grandfather just died on Wednesday, and so I thought I’d write about some of his finer moments. What were you surprised to learn about your grandparents? Feel free to talk about any older person if you want.
When I was a kid I used to love to look through this HUGE photo album at my Grandparents house.
There was a picture of this one girl in there. She looked like one of those old time movie star actress from the 20’s or 30’s. Very beatiful I thought. I had a little crush on her. I had no idea who she was.
Well, one day my Grandmother came and sat with me one the couch as I was flipping through the old photo album. When we came across the picture; I asked my Grandmother:
Me: “Grandma, who’s that girl right there?” (points)
Her: “Oh, that was me when I was about 16/18 years old. I used to be a pretty girl back then wasn’t I?”
Me: “yes” :o
It’s a good thing at the time I was too young to understand how uncool it is to have a crush on your own Grandmother! [/shivers]
My Granny was a Good Samaritan. A volunteer service in England where people who needed someone to talk to could call. I used to notice Granny was on the phone a lot - one of my enduring memories of her. By chance I learned she was working a suicide hotline. It was the aftermath of the second world war - 1960’s.
Sorry to hear of the death of the old man, Lakai. I think those folks choose not to pass on too much about the bombed villages of their past - they gain satisfaction knowing future generations have been saved from that.
Three of them died before I was born, and they remained resolutely dead ever since.
The one grandmother I barely knew surprised me years after her own death. When my mom’s sister died, we got a box of pictures. One of them showed Grandmother Viola in her twenties. She was a dead ringer for my older brother’s second wife, the one who bore his two children. My brother and I had never seen that picture before, and he had no idea he was marrying a girl who looked like his mom’s mom.
There was this subgenre in Spain in the 70s and 80s, novels and short story collections about life in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 or about political situations. Pretty humorous unless you happened to be a firm believer in the politics they made fun of. One of the things some of these writers would talk about was “whole families volunteering for ‘the Cause’.” Turns out one of these families was my Dad’s side of the family. My two great-aunts, being female, were originally assigned to work as nurses, but when the officers realized what a sarge the older one was, they transferred her to Logistics, where she’d be directly under her father’s orders, in the hopes that he’d be able to put her bossiness to good use. She did, indeed, make sergeant. I never got to meet her, and as my other grandfather once told Mom “your husband’s side doesn’t believe in boasting,” so war stories are few and far between on that side, but what little I know was pretty impressive. The youngest great uncle was only 17 at the time, so he needed parental permission to volunteer; one went from his first year of medical school (which in Spain isn’t graduate school, he was only 18) to operating in a war front hospital; Grandpa was wounded (and Dad was made while Grandpa was home recovering, so the family says that my Dad owed his life to a guy from the other side) but recovered well; another brother came back to get buried.
One day we were at the doctor’s house (for about ten minutes) and saw that he had panoplies with medals and weaponry on the walls (mostly swords). We asked about them and he explained that they were officer sabers worn by our foreparents in the Carlista wars and the medals they’d won in the same wars (including the 1936 war). I really, really, really wish I knew the stories behind them, because those were some pretty big medals and even if there were times when they got handed out like candy, it was an impressive amount. But I doubt I’ll ever be able to read the commendations, sadly. Still, seeing them kind’a brought home hard the fact that those wars I’d read about in history books had seen my family’s blood, they’re not just something that happened in a galaxy far, far away…
I was a tad suprised to find out that my grandmother spent the winters in Florida working at the door of a gay bar. I found that out when I turned 21 and she offered to take me to a club in Ohio owned by the same guy.
My grandparents were older and retired when I was born, so I only knew them as old folks living in Florida. It wasn’t until I was much older that I learned my grandfather had worked his way up from penniless immigrant status to an extremely successful real estate broker in just a few years – regularly booking more $1 million in sales each year throughout the 1920s – only to see everything vanish during the Depression, and having to start over from scratch.
I posted the World War II stories from my family [post=10457110]here.[/post] The story of my “Tante Lune” is most meaningful to me, even if she wasn’t biologically related to me.
My maternal grandmother was an extremely proper and reserved woman. But she had a great collection of Yiddish curses. Once at a family dinner at her house my parents talked her into telling a few and translating them. Things like “Make a trolley car grow in your stomach so you pass wooden nickles!” After the second or third one, my proper and pale grandmother was laughing so hard she could not translate the phrases from Yiddish into English. She was also laughing so hard that she turned the exact color of the scarlet piping on the neckline of her dress! It remains my most surprising memory of her.
My paternal grandmother was one of the nicest and sweetest people I’ve ever known. One time she’s having dinner at my parents’ house. I was away at school, but my sister was there with her boyfriend - they were going to announce that they were engaged, so they were pretty nervous. Before the “big announcement” my Grandmother was talking about the movie My Left Foot, which she had just seen. She talked about the scene where the main character tells this well meaning speech therapist to fuck off, and the speech therapist replies “I can teach you to say ‘fuck off’ more distinctly.” My sister yelled out in shock “Grandma - you said THAT word!!!”
I suppose we should not have been surprised, she did raise two boys. But we were!
Then there was the time that my paternal grandmother proved she was not trapped in the ideas of her generation - she suggested that Mama Zappa and I live together before we were married.
After Mama Zappa and I were married, we were having dinner with my parents and my paternal grandmother at a chinese restaurant. Mama Zappa and I had just heard about the trick of adding the words “in bed” to the end of a fortune cookie forturne to add hilarity. Of the five fortune cookies at that meal, two were nt funny with the addition, two were mildly amusing, and my grandmother’s was “New business opportunities await you” :eek: Ack! My bride smiled and said “Grandma! I had no idea!” We all laughed about that one for years!
My grandfather was a good man but he was extremely serious about everything or so it seemed to me. I don’t ever remember him joking and he rarely smiled. He was an iron worker and I was getting old enough where he started showing me how to weld and how to use various fasteners and tools of the trade.
One day I was finishing bolting something together and he hands me a hard rubber covering. He explained that it was used to cover the exposed bolt and that it was called a nipple. He looks at me and said “of course, it isn’t as soft as your grandma’s though” then he winked at me and sort of grinned. Me::o
My maternal grandma passed away in her 60s, but my grandpa lived for almost another 20 years.
When he was about 79, he met a “young hussy” who was only 65 or so, and they began a romance! He had all but given up- he had moved into assisted living and had decided he was old and probably about to die. Once he met Tilly, that all changed- road trips to Vegas, climbing the pyramid at Chichen Itza (well, the first two steps, anyway!).
The best part was when he told me he was getting rid of his condo at the assisted-living place. He decided it was silly to pay rent when he was never there- he was spending almost every night at Tilly’s house!
My wife’s grandmother, shortly after we moved out here, was babysitting for us. She wanted to know about what time we’d be back. When assuring her we would be back by ten, she said great, that way she’d be able to catch her Saturday show.
Talk Sex, with a little old lady talking about Dildo’s and Anal Beads (which my white-haired old granny mentioned twice) and suchlike.
Just a few weeks ago, she was telling my wife about her recent needle biopsy, and just whipped her boob out to show her the site. My wife just about fainted.
A couple of Christmases ago, my mother gave me a rhinestone pin. It had the letter I, then the shape of a heart, then the shape of a cat. I started laughing when I opened it, because the part of my brain that belongs to a twelve-year-old boy translated the message of the pin as “I love pussy”. Mom started laughing too, and said, “I hoped you wouldn’t notice that.” Grandma held up the pin Mom had given her, which was in the shape of a rooster (or “cock”) and said, “Good thing there’s no ‘I heart’ on this one!” :eek:
That’s so far out of character for her that I’m still trying to convince myself she didn’t really know what we were talking about.
Around 1980, when I was 12 or 13, I saw the outstanding movie Breaker Morant. It’s a true story that takes place in the Boer War. I was telling my mother what a great movie it was, and she said, “Oh, my father was a soldier in the Boer War”. She pulled out pictures of him posing with his unit in Africa, some old gear of his, and even an uncut diamond he brought back with him somehow. He was long dead by then - he died well before I was born, but considering all that I had heard about him until then was that he was a housepainter, hearing he was a soldier in a 19th century war was pretty amazing.
Driving past a house that is now used by a theater company, my grandmother once remarked in a fairly offhand manner, “And that used to be the boarding house where I lived when I moved away from home when I turned 18 and my mother was still beating me.” :eek:
When I was a kid, a neighbor and I had found these adult magazines. Being kids, we found them super gross and super thrilling. We made up a game where we pulled out the centerfolds and dared each other to kiss the photos right on or near naughty parts, which of course we found disgusting and squeal-inducing. When we got bored, which we quickly did, we went off and did something else and I forgot to hide them away.
My grandmother was staying with us and she found them. I was horrified and mortified beyond belief. Grandma was very committed to her Dutch Reformed faith and I am sure she found these things very shocking and offensive. But she was completely calm in how she handled it, and I don’t think she told my parents. I still marvel at it.
My other grandma started dating her late husband’s brother (himself a widower), decades after her husband died. At one of the family Christmases where we all met up at a hotel, they shared a room. They were in their 70s, at least. Her oldest daughter (my Aunt, whom I love to death, but who is pretty traditional) was not comfortable with that. Grandma told her to butt out and get over it. Way to go, Grandma!
My paternal grandfather surprised us when he became one of the oldest people in these parts to get his pilot’s license: he was 76 years old, and flew for a couple of years. It was something he did after my grandmother died and it gave him great satisfaction.
One of my favorite photos of my maternal grandfather is at his 95th birthday party. He’s holding his hand above the blaze of candles as if to warm it by a fireplace on a cold day. It’s charming.
Three were gone before I was born, and the fourth didn’t last too many years later. The one survivor did give me a pretty big surprise though – when I was five or so she came after me with a very large knife. This was a couple of months post-stroke, however, so I grant her some slack on the whole “trying to kill me” issue.
There are some old concentration camp survivors in my neighborhood. Some like to talk about it and some don’t.
I once met one of the latter on an extremely cold morning. And we were discussing the weather and in the most casual sort of way he said it reminded him of this time towards the end of the war when his concentration camp was being transferred west, ahead of the advancing Russian armies. The weather was bitterly cold and they were packed into open boxcars. People kept dying like flies, and whenever they came to a stop, they would throw out the dead bodies. Finally one prisoner made an announcement - he pointed out that the only thing giving them any sort of small protection against the cold and the wind was the fact that they are so tightly packed together, and if they continued throwing out the dead bodies they would all die. So after that they kept them in. My neighbor slept that night standing up, propped against two dead bodies.
The way he described the events, he could have been any old guy talking about some minor incident in his past. But when I once asked him to address my wife’s HS history class, he refused, saying it was too hard for him to conjure up the memories. (He said he once did it for some sort of film project and ended up crying most of the time.)
OTOH, another guy in my neighborhood actually wrote a book about his experiences. Different people feel different ways.
who was only 65 or so, and they began a romance! He had all but given up- he had moved into assisted living and had decided he was old and probably about to die. Once he met Tilly, that all changed- road trips to Vegas, climbing the pyramid at Chichen Itza (well, the first two steps, anyway!).
