My dad’s side of the family was the artistic side. Also, the wilder side. Not surprisingly, as the two have a tendency to go hand-in-hand. My grandfather grew up in the upper Midwest, his father a country doctor. My grandfather (whom we called Gramps or Grampy) was one of several boys, none of whom we ever met, and when he was growing up, Gramps apparently slept on his father’s examining table, in the same room with the human skeleton that my great-grandfather had hanging in there. My grandfather chose to be an interior designer when he grew up. He lived to the ripe old age of 96, and was still working half-days, taking the bus to and from work at my dad’s and mom’s wholesale window treatment company, until the day he died. I was pretty small when he passed, but I have fond memories of sitting in his lap and sucking on the ends of the bolo ties he would sometimes wear.

 

My grandmother was of Dutch descent, related to a well-known opera singer who sang at the Met and recorded some 78s. We never met her, either, but we often heard Cousin Olive referred to, as she was one of the more illustrious family members. My grandmother evidently charmed my grandfather, who was still a bachelor at age forty, when selling magazines door-to-door; she was twenty when they married.  She was a powerhouse. We all adored Grammy, as we called her, and I remember that she wore me out when I was four years old. Plus, her driving was scary. She always drove as if we were in hot pursuit of bank robbers. Grammy died on the last leg of a round-the-world cruise when I was 13. Had a heart attack coming down the gangplank in Hawaii.

 

My grandmother was an accomplished pianist and taught music lessons; in addition, she was quite the patron of the arts in Kansas City. I’m not sure how many siblings she had but her baby brother, whom we called “Unc,” used to take us rollerskating at El Torreon roller rink, which we thought made him fabulously cool (an adult who rollerskates!), and then she also had a brother named Percy, whom we never met, either.

 

We never even really heard much about Great Uncle Percy until my aunt Lillian, the eldest child in my dad’s family, reached her early nineties (still living independently on top of Mt. Soledad, even almost blind from macular degeneration). And she told us this story while Richard and I were visiting during the time that we were building the deck for my brother:

 

Great Uncle Percy was a band leader in Chicago in the Twenties. But then The Depression hit and people weren’t partying the way they used to. So my uncle lost his job and couldn’t find another one anywhere. He came to Kansas City where he had family, and my grandmother asked my granddad if Percy could live with them while times were hard. My grandfather told her, “Absolutely not!”

 

Not one to take “no” for an answer, my grandmother then moved Percy up into the attic, where he lived for an unspecified length of time. He would only come out during the day when my grandfather was at work and play the family piano, but my grandfather would often meet my grandmother going up the stairs with a dinner tray for her brother. Gramps never said a word!

 

There were four children on my dad’s side of the family, the eldest being Lillian, then my dad, then his elegant sister Carol, and then Harriette. Carol lived in KC, but Lillian, as I mentioned in a previous post, moved to California with her husband where they got in early on La Jolla real estate, and my aunt Harriette (or Hatty, as we knew her), lived in New Hampshire, married to a professor of English Lit, a Chaucer expert. At various times, she was a gold- and silversmith, an enamel artist, and a photographer.

 

We spent a few weeks each summer on the shores of Lake Michigan in Omena, where Gramps and Grammy had a cottage. I loved it there, with forest sheltering the cabin that had large, screened-in front and back porches, and the lake right at the bottom of a set of stairs that my grandfather decorated with smooth stones from the lake. My grandparents had an old Townhouse canoe that we kids were allowed to paddle across the bay to the general store where we would buy an ice cream bar or an apple or the Sunday paper. There was a yacht club on the cove that we belonged to (with our canoe), which I mainly remember for the ping-pong table that was on a second-floor unscreened-in porch (games could take forever as chasing a wayward ball meant galloping down the stairs and searching for it in the grass) and the talent contests. One year I performed my ventriloquist act with my dummy George and won.

 

My dad, who was a member of the Polar Bear’s club and quite the daredevil, was always bunging himself up (starting at age four when he accidentally put one of his eyes out trying to cut himself a slice of watermelon), until the day he fell from a rotting second floor balcony at a neighbor’s house and broke his back on a retaining wall, severing his spinal cord. He was in a wheel chair from then on, but he never let it stop him from living a full and vigorous life. It was difficult in quite a lot of ways, but at the same time, he was an unbelievable inspiration. And it has been very cool, as an adult, to become good friends with one of the early disabled activists who was responsible for getting in place accommodations for those in wheelchairs, like handicapped accessible parking places and restrooms, ramps on curbs, etc. None of those things existed when I was growing up, and I can’t tell how much of an improvement in quality of life those things can make in a disabled person’s life.

 

At any rate, it was fun to get to know Aunt Lil better, since I didn’t really know her growing up. She was a gracious hostess and an affectionate aunt. But soon the time we had to work on the deck was coming to a close. And since the plans had grown so much since we had originally scheduled this job, we were going to have to leave with the deck unfinished. This was a drag, obviously, but Hal was very understanding. So we made plans to come back and finish it when we could. And soon we were heading home to celebrate the holidays.