The Daily Special

My maternal grandparents met when my grandfather, just home from the front during WWI, having fudged on his age in order to enlist, walked into the mercantile store in a tiny southwest Kansas town and encountered my grandmother, who was fifteen years old and working as a sales clerk.  From that moment on, the rest, as they say, is history, as he instantly swept her off her feet.  Or it could have been the other way around, since she sold him a pair of shoes.

Within a short time they were married and raising the first of nine children born to their union.  Theirs was a long and happy love story and they were the initiators of a dynasty large enough to rival that of the Kennedy clan, albeit without the accompanying wealth.

They spent all of their 50-plus years together in that same tidy little town, thirty miles from our farm -- which meant we didn’t get to see them on a daily basis the way we did our paternal grandparents who lived just across the driveway from us.  That made the times we did spend with them seem special and memorable, but I was always more than a little jealous of the cousins who lived in the same town with them – it didn’t seem quite fair somehow.

Grandma and Grandpa made up for it, though, by being some of the most interesting, entertaining people I’ve ever known and by insuring that all of our moments together were happy ones.  Grandma started a home and family in lieu of finishing school, but that lapse in education didn’t keep her from consistently being her refined, gracious, and intriguing self.  Grandpa never really had the opportunity for formal education past the eighth grade because when he should have been starting high school he was homesteading a claim in eastern Colorado at the behest of his step-father, a mean and mentally unbalanced man who left him out in that barren country on his own.  The detour proved no detriment to Grandpa, however, as he eventually became self-taught in several languages, a math whiz, an electronics genius, a man vitally engaged in world events, and a lifelong seeker of knowledge, a mindset that he passed on to his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

 As often as they could, Grandma and Grandpa would come to the farm on Sunday evenings with a big cool jello salad and one of Grandma’s famous sour cream chocolate cakes with caramel icing.  From the moment they stepped through the door, everything changed.  The house felt so light it was almost levitating, filled with laughter and the heady aroma of Grandpa’s pipe and Grandma’s perfume.  The cards and board games would be brought out from their storage spot under the stairs and everyone from little on up got to join in. 

Even better was going to their house, usually on a Sunday afternoon.  It was the height of comfort to walk in and smell Grandpa’s pipe and the lingering aroma of whatever delicious lunch Grandma had cooked that day.  Grandpa would invariably be settled in his recliner with a crossword puzzle, which he worked in ink as a matter of principle, a golf tournament or a baseball game murmuring away on TV, and the smoke from his ever-present pipe wafting through the living room.  The house would be warm and cozy to the point of serving as an instant sedative to restless energetic grandchildren, and on cold winter days we all vied for a spot on the floor furnace while it churned out soothing heat waves.  

       

 We knew they were glad to have us there because Grandma was all smiles and happy talk, and Grandpa didn’t grouse at us for simply being kids.  If we ever did get too rambunctious, all he had to do to restore order was snap his newspaper and shoot us a look over the top of his glasses.  He was very subtle in his regard for us, but we felt it nonetheless.

Their house was the default site for countless holiday meals, with aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and hangers-on crowding together, laughing, talking, teasing, and enjoying the sumptuous feasts that were laid out on the lonnnnnng table that stretched the length of the dining and living rooms, cobbled together expressly for those celebrations.  The women did the cooking, and after dinner my uncles, whom I adored, went to the kitchen, rolled up their sleeves, and did the mounds of dishes, all the while laughing and talking about things we cousins were not privy to.

What will stay with me forever is how engaged in life Grandpa and Grandma were.  They kept themselves healthy and active and they ate well, but Grandpa refused to allow himself seconds, and never did outgrow his military uniforms.  In fact, he and some combination of his six sons, all of whom served in the various branches of the military, marched in the town Memorial Day parade every year, each wearing their original service garb.  Grandma, to my knowledge, never left the house without her hair and nails up to snuff, enveloped head to toe in some heavenly scent and dressed in something appealing and up-to-date.  They kept up with the times, read voraciously, were interested in everything that came along, thrived on late-night television, and loved to laugh.  Grandma was well known for her refusal to gossip or speak negatively about anyone – it was all about the here, the now, the potential.  Bottom line, they were fun and a joy to be around.  They never thought old and they never seemed old, and they were great role models.  Grandma earned the family nickname "The Queen Bee," and even my boy cousins would say they wanted to be like her when they grew up.

I loved all my grandparents equally but in different ways.  Looking back now, it’s obvious that one set was highly conservative and the other quite liberal in their approach to life, and that being exposed to that dichotomy influenced and shaped my own life in key ways I’m just now happily sorting out.  

Victor E. Reese

Jennie Marie Somerville, age 15

My grandparents with their nine children, plus one granddaughter at center.

  

My mother, Virginia Wagner, is at the far right.