Tell me a story grandpa
My brother and I, on occasion, asked our dad to tell us what it was like when he was a child. We were less than ten-years-old at the time. We never got any stories out of him.
We only learned a few things from his mother, our paternal grandmother. He was a bit shy then, or “bashful” as my rural, central Illinois kin would say.
Likewise, we never heard many stories of her youth from my mother. The only one I recall is that she and her siblings, the children of tenant farmers, took lard sandwiches to school, while the town kids ate oranges from the “relief” packages distributed by the government during the Depression. She was cautioned by her proud mother, “Don’t you dare take one of those handouts!” According to her she never did.
The mere thought of a cold, greasy lard sandwich turned my stomach until decades later when I would first eat lard on bread before vodka drinking bouts with Polish generals in central Europe. The Polish lard was wonderful, it tasted just like butter, and served to coat your stomach to slow down the effects of chilled vodka shots. Completely different than the youthful memory of a blue and white tin of pale, congealed lard sitting on the kitchen stove to be spooned into a cast-iron skillet for frying potatoes.
The lone story I remember my father telling when I was a youth, involved my paternal grandfather’s single shot, breech loading shotgun. The same battered old shotgun locked in my gun case, next to the polished Browning Citori trapguns far out of a workman’s reach.
Dad, after school, would take the shotgun and a lone twelve gauge shell, he could afford to buy, and walk along the Central and Eastern Illinois Railroad tracks (known to all along its line as the sea-any-eye, which I didn’t learn was C and EI, the abbreviation for the railroad, until well into my teens), seeking a rabbit for dinner. A missed shot meant a meatless supper during the late 1930’s, when the rural Midwest was still recovering from the economic ravages of the Great Depression.
During those lean years, my paternal grandfather once walked the near forty miles from Tuscola, Illinois, to Decatur, Illinois, looking for work. Finding none, he walked back. They owned no car and didn’t have the money for train fare. Those economic lessons marked my parents for their lifetimes and the tales of economic desperation shaped my youth, even during the prosperous era of the 1950’s and ‘60’s.
My maternal grandmother, on the other hand, loved to tell stories of her youth. Perhaps it had to do with age and the outlook on life that comes with approaching mortality.
She told us stories of the whiskey-drinking, fist- fighting, guns toting Shelton gang, who occupied a road house down the dirt lane from her home deep in the hollers of Southern Illinois’ Wayne County. The gang spent Sunday afternoons drinking, brawling and occasionally shooting at one another, to the dismay of her Southern Baptist, teetotaling family.
Or of her deep-seated desire to become a school teacher, but there was no money to send her beyond the eighth grade, so her education stopped at that one room school house, heated by a pot-bellied coal burner, with two outhouses. One for the boys, one for the girls. Born in 1898, she was the only one of my four grandparents to finish the eighth grade.
Neither of my sons, one well into middle age, the other rapidly approaching middle age, nor my primary school aged grandson, has ever asked me to tell them what it was like when I was young. A lack of interest on their part? Perhaps. Perhaps it’s that they have so many other diversions today. Perhaps people no longer tell stories, or no longer have the opportunity to sit on the porch, rocking away, as an evening breeze stirs the humid, summer heat, while telling the stories that pass time away as the corn grows.
(c) William L. Enyart, 2020.
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