Holiday Memories

This time of year brings back memories of the holidays my family and I shared while I was growing up. We had a small family, it was just my dad, me and older sister. We used to go to my grandma's (dad's mom) house for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and most other holidays or breaks. Usually it was just our family and my grandma and her husband, Charlie. He was a nice guy, very quiet. My grandma talked a lot (must be where I got it, hmm?), so he must have either been a good listener, or was good at pretending to listen. We always felt welcome at their house. Charlie sometimes had his kids over. They were older than my sister and I, I think. They didn't always come over, I think there was some estrangement there, which I didn't pick up on as a kid, but learned about later.

My dad and his mother in the late 1950's

I don't have any more recent pictures of her on my computer. Well I say more recent, she died about 20 years ago, but I only have the older family pictures on my computer. I have to see if my dad can scan the photos that he has.

A few holidays my sister and I went to our Grandpa's house. He was my mom's dad. He had remarried. I didn't feel that we weren't really welcomed by his wife, but later my sister told me what she picked up on. I was too young to really understand. After we moved to Nebraska when I was 14, I don't think I ever stayed at their place again, though I did see him occasionally. I lived in Kansas when he was in the hospital, in 1991 or 1992. My mom (who I call Beverly because she never tried to be a mom to me), had come up to see him from Florida, where she lived with her husband. I hadn't seen her since I was 13 or 14 and my sister and I had gone down to see her in Texas, where she lived at the time. When she picked up my daughter, who was about 2 at the time, she didn't even know how to hold her, and she had had three children! I was glad to finally meet my oldest sister then, she was from Beverly's first marriage (my dad was her second). She and I have kept in touch erratically. It's hard to really feel very close to someone that you didn't grow up with, even though you are related by blood.

This is my grandpa with my oldest daughter when she was a couple of months old in 1989.