Grandparents are a rarity in our family. This grandfather died two weeks before I was born, and my grandmothers on both sides of the family died before I was a year old.
I’ve a special affinity for “Bye Bye Blackbird” because I’m told Dad’s mother sung it to me as a baby and maybe in my heart I remember.
My grandfather left Germany on Hitler’s first rise, and tales were told that he jumped ship in NY harbor rather than be shipped back to the Brownshirts. He worked at Sears in NYC and they lived in Brooklyn and Queens in German neighborhoods and English wasn’t spoken in my father’s home.
When he retired from Sears they bought a small place in the Adirondacks. My grandfather made most of the furniture, including Adirondack chairs outdoors. He made lamps my sister and I had in our bedroom in high school, and repainted to go with our yellow, black and silver wallpaper, funky 2×10″ bedframes made by Dad, and shag carpeting. There’s no accounting for taste in a teenager.
So, when my grandparents died, Dad had to sell the place immediately so sold it furnished. Forty years later he stopped by on a trip and the owners, summer residents, invited him in. He showed their son how to work the oil stove, as he’d been taught when he was 17 and en route to be the first in his family to go to college.
The home was static. His parents could have still been living there. The furnishings were all there, along with his family photos on the walls. It was a very strange feeling. I’ve been there (exterior only) in the Fall once or twice to visit the tree under which my grandfather is buried. I look at the Adirondack chairs on the porch and know they were made by his hands.
The tools I played with as a child were his, and now my husband is amassing a set of woodworking tools for yet another carpenter. No, not ours. We were lucky in love but not in having children.
It appears the theme of my life is a series of carpenters. But in the end, we all cobble our lives together and that’s the beauty of life. Oh, my other grandfather, who died 25 years ago, built bridges. Now what does that say about my role in life? I can tell you it’s constructive, pun intended. Cheers, Dee
Cooking with Dee 