Christmas past
This is an homage to my grandfather. The older I get, the more I miss him. (He died when I was 18.)
He was the glue that held the family together during the holidays. I have the "Norman Rockewell" Christmas memories because everybody wanted to make him happy.
He didn't put up with my uncle (his son's) radical shit. My uncle likes to stir things up by getting on peoples' nerves. Don't know why, but he gets a real charge out of it. Very annoying.
My grandfather would shut him down the second he started. My grandmother would just roll her eyes, as though she thought my grandfather was being too authoritarian. But, in shutting him down, everybody got along very nicely.
Ever since my grandfather passed, the holidays have never been the same. My uncle starts in on his crap, people get annoyed, and my grandmother thinks everyone is against my uncle, as if it's our fault that we don't get along with him. My uncle listens to her, so she has the ability to keep him under control, but she thinks that everybody's "just too hard on Mike."
"Nobody understands his sense of humor," she always says.
My grandfather was a short, frail man, but everybody listened to him. He was everybody's drinking buddy and a real "good-time Charlie," but he also had a very intense side: when he spoke, people listened. He just had that certain "cult of personality;" you just listened to him, and didn't think twice of it.
I wouldn't say he was a "war hero," but he had letters of commendation from commanding officers for his service during WWII. (He operated a flame thrower in the Marshall Islands.)
After his stint in the Pacific Theater, he got a gig as a sports writer for the Stars and Stripes, and got to meet all the major league baseball players of the day, while stationed in Honolulu.
He was the type who could hold his own with people like that, no question. Why he never tried to get syndicated or get a job in a major market, is beyond me. That just wasn't his style. He had his own newspaper, and as far as he was concerned, that's all he needed. (He lost the paper shortly before being discharged: to his dying day, he suspected my grandmother of torching it for the insurance, but I'm the only one he ever shared that with.)
He got a job with Findlay's newspaper, became the treasurer of the Typographical Union, and retired after 30 years as a typesetter.
He loved his union buddies, his poker games and his wife. He had a well-balanced life, not being too ambitious, but always making sure his wife and children had everything they needed.
He was the glue that held the family together during the holidays, and they haven't been the same since he passed. I always wonder if anyone will ever think of me like that.
He was the glue that held the family together during the holidays. I have the "Norman Rockewell" Christmas memories because everybody wanted to make him happy.
He didn't put up with my uncle (his son's) radical shit. My uncle likes to stir things up by getting on peoples' nerves. Don't know why, but he gets a real charge out of it. Very annoying.
My grandfather would shut him down the second he started. My grandmother would just roll her eyes, as though she thought my grandfather was being too authoritarian. But, in shutting him down, everybody got along very nicely.
Ever since my grandfather passed, the holidays have never been the same. My uncle starts in on his crap, people get annoyed, and my grandmother thinks everyone is against my uncle, as if it's our fault that we don't get along with him. My uncle listens to her, so she has the ability to keep him under control, but she thinks that everybody's "just too hard on Mike."
"Nobody understands his sense of humor," she always says.
My grandfather was a short, frail man, but everybody listened to him. He was everybody's drinking buddy and a real "good-time Charlie," but he also had a very intense side: when he spoke, people listened. He just had that certain "cult of personality;" you just listened to him, and didn't think twice of it.
I wouldn't say he was a "war hero," but he had letters of commendation from commanding officers for his service during WWII. (He operated a flame thrower in the Marshall Islands.)
After his stint in the Pacific Theater, he got a gig as a sports writer for the Stars and Stripes, and got to meet all the major league baseball players of the day, while stationed in Honolulu.
He was the type who could hold his own with people like that, no question. Why he never tried to get syndicated or get a job in a major market, is beyond me. That just wasn't his style. He had his own newspaper, and as far as he was concerned, that's all he needed. (He lost the paper shortly before being discharged: to his dying day, he suspected my grandmother of torching it for the insurance, but I'm the only one he ever shared that with.)
He got a job with Findlay's newspaper, became the treasurer of the Typographical Union, and retired after 30 years as a typesetter.
He loved his union buddies, his poker games and his wife. He had a well-balanced life, not being too ambitious, but always making sure his wife and children had everything they needed.
He was the glue that held the family together during the holidays, and they haven't been the same since he passed. I always wonder if anyone will ever think of me like that.
posted by Boris Yeltsin @ 10:18 PM
2 Comments:
At 12:20 AM, December 25, 2004,
Maya said…
What sort of radical shit did your uncle talk about? And so sorry about your grandfather, Boris. It's sad that time doesn't heal all wounds. I hope that you can remember the good times during the holidays. Your comments on my blog are always great and I count today's as a great Christmas present. :)
Best of luck.
At 5:25 PM, December 27, 2004,
Boris Yeltsin said…
My uncle finds out what gets someone pissed off, and he continually keeps pushing their buttons.
I just enclosed my grandmother's back porch. I had some scrap lumber that I was using as templates for my angle cuts. He started throwing my scrap lumber away, before I was done. That means, I had to keep reinventing the wheel on figuring what angle the 2x4's had to be cut at.
It just adds another step to the process, plus, he's driving up my costs, because when I need a peice of board, I can't use a peice of scrap, I've got to go out and buy another board.
He'll come into the house, and say, "Are there any templates I should be aware of, so I don't accidently throw them away?" while he's got this smirk on his face, like he thinks you take yourself way too seriously.
It just pisses you off, especially if you've been exposed to it for a long time.
But, I can handle it. It's just during the holidays I feel sorry for my grandmother, because her refusal to do anything about my uncle, is causing the family gatherings at the holidays to get smaller and smaller, and she thinks it's because of her age. It's because she won't do anything to stop my uncle from annoying the living shit out of everybody in sight.
When my grandfather's newspaper burned, it was underinsured, and even though my grandmother wanted him to sell it, my grandfather wanted to make a go of it.
Because they had to repurchase all of the equipment out of their own pockets, by the time they had kids, they couldn't afford a babysitter, so my uncle and my mom were heavily exposed to lead-dust from the typesetting machine and linotype cases.
I think that affected both my uncle and my mom in huge ways, for their entire lives. (Back in the late 1940's to mid 1950's, no one knew about the dangers of lead exposure to children.)
I think that's why both of them are a little off. (OK, alot off!)
Case in point: my uncle actually tried to "defect" to the Soviet Union back in the late sixties. The Soviet embassy thought it was a prank (because nobody ever wanted to defect,) so they sent him to the French Embassy. The French called the CIA, and told them to pick him up. The CIA put him in a looney bin, and when they found out he didn't have insurance, they released him.
That's the kind of guy my uncle is.
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