Maybe it was a good day - Episode 60

I’ve written often of my dad but I thought today, that I would write about his dad, my grandpa Spence.

My grandfather had a life of major heartbreaks and tragedies but he didn’t seem broken, to me as a child.

And, I've found something that immortalized what a good day might have looked like in those trying times. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Happy to Be Canadian Podcast. I'm Suzanne Spence Wilkins, a writer who lives in rural southwestern Ontario, Canada. Each week I share an original, very short story that will have you laughing and reflecting on the simple moments of our lives. Now, on to today's episode. Happy to be Canadian, episode 60. What a good day looks like. My grandfather had a life of major heartbreaks and tragedies, but he didn't seem broken to me as a child. When he died, he was about a year older than I am now. His last few years marked with the relentless treatments and undying hope that are part of many cancer journeys. He lost a leg to cancer near the end, and most of a hand to a corn picker thirty years earlier. His father died when he was eleven years old. He lost his dreams to be a pilot in a gravel pit near Chicago in 1928, when he and a partner crashed their newly purchased airplane and could not find it upon their return. He lost his first child, a two-year-old daughter, when her nightgown brushed a coal stove and she was burnt beyond hope in 1933. He lost a 27-year-old son to a boating accident in 1964. His widowed mother and brother couldn't or wouldn't support him buying a farm of his own just across the road from their home. He and his wife and four children lived in the multi-generational home where he was born and would never own. As I write this list, I wonder, how did he cope? I never saw him drink, but he did smoke many, many roll your own cigarettes. He had a small rolling machine that fit in the palm of his hand. It consisted of a light metal frame with two wooden dowels, about the diameter of a cigarette, and just a little bit longer. A width of sturdy fabric formed a sleeve around the rollers. It was loose enough to form a pocket between the rollers where the smoker would lay first a sheet of rolling paper, and then a thin line of loose tobacco. Once the ingredients were inside, a metal arm would be pulled over the top to tighten everything. The operator would turn the sides of the rollers to compress the tobacco into a cylinder. A fine line of rolling paper with the gum seal exposed would come out the top of the machine. A quick flick of the seal and the operator would lift the metal arm and the rollers would separate to release the cigarette. We all rolled cigarettes for him, my grandmother as a dutiful support, and the grandkids as a fun family activity. Later, when the dangers of smoking became known, my grandmother started rolling filtered cigarettes for him in a new fangled home cigarette making machine. But he ripped the filters off before lighting up. In the 1940s, my grandfather was hospitalized more than once at Homewood Sanitarium in Guelph, a private institution for people suffering from addictions and poor mental health. Not long before he died, my dad told me that Grandpa received electroshock treatments there. There are two pictures of him during one of his stays at Homewood. In one, Grandpa is standing at the entrance gate with the facility's name spelled out above him on a thin metal arch. In the other picture, which I believe was taken the same day, my grandfather looks like a 1940s movie star relaxing between filming scenes. Or maybe the heir of a Scottish estate. He is sitting with his feet up on a wood slatted chaise lounge in the middle of a well-kept lawn. Behind him, an overgrown juniper shrub, its branches poking in every direction, borders a brick building with regularly spaced, many paned windows. The bricks and some of the window frames are obscured by large leafed ivy vines. My grandpa's slim body is draped in a loose-fitting light-colored suit complemented with a white shirt and dark tie. In the foreground, the bottoms of his shoes are scuffed. They look like white patent leather loafers. He appears forlorn, his skin slack on his cheeks, his hands large, and he is holding a cigarette in his right hand. The photograph was taken before the corn picker accident because his left hand is not hidden in his pocket. He never let that fleshy hook be memorialized on film until near his end when he had no place left to hide it. On the back of the photograph, my grandmother has written Plate at Guelph, as if he might have been on a sabbatical at the university. Of all the moments to record for the family album, I wonder about saving that one. Maybe it was a good day. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Happy to Be Canadian. If you would like to receive an email each Saturday morning that features new short stories and more, you can sign up on my website, www.crazy8barn.com. If you would like to meet me in person and discover another way that we tell our rural stories, please join me at a Barn Quilt Painting Workshop at our beautiful eight-sided barn in Palmyra, Ontario, along the North Shore of Lake Erie. You can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Crazy8 Barn. If you are an Apple Podcast listener and enjoyed this podcast, I would appreciate it if you could leave me a favorable review. And that lets Apple know that Happy to Be Canadian is a valuable podcast and it shares it with other potential listeners. I'm Suzanne Spence Wilkins, and I'm Happy to Be Canadian.