Musings and Meditations

I wish I’d met my great grandparents. My entire knowledge of them consists of knowing that my father’s mother’s mother was an evil woman of epic proportions and wife to my father’s mother’s father who was by all accounts a very tall and practically saintly man (humph! I wonder for I think he's probably at least marginally responsible for his wife’s evilness in some way), that my father’s father’s mother was an aunt to Thomas Edison and my mother’s mother’s mother died during the great influenza epidemic of 1918 causing her children to be scattered to the four winds. It’s just not enough information to satisfy my curiosity. I realize I was lucky to even know my grandparents.



I wonder what all of them would think of the world today!




My maternal grandparents (Robert Elmer Gilmore and Dollie Nellie Huston), my grandfather in particular, were forward thinking people. My grandfather proudly babied my grandmother with whatever the latest technology was. In the mid-60’s they had a color TV, a steam iron, a double electric oven (in which my grandmother, who seriously couldn’t cook her way out of a wet paper bag, thought everything should be cooked on “broil” with disastrous results and on numerous occasions), a matched washer and dryer set and a house furnished in whatever was the current trend and colors. I remember thinking as a kid that they had a house like those you see on TV furnished with all the things people won on “The Newlywed Game”. My grandfather was an entrepreneurial guy who started his own cab company in Yuba City in about 1945 with my grandmother as dispatcher out of an office they set up in their own dining room. They ably provided a solid middle class lifestyle for their family – pretty good for a couple of itinerate farm kids out of the Oklahoma dust bowl. I think my maternal grandfather, a writer and poet, a chess and checkers lover fluent in two other self-taught languages, would embrace video technology and take pleasure in having an MP3 player and cell phone in his pocket. My grandmother was a fiend for Avon products and would have loved laser technology and Botox for her wrinkles.

My fraternal grandparents (John Arthur Roy and Helen Marguerite Palmer) were about a decade older and so a bit more old school(for lack of a better word). They raised seven children in Michigan through the height of the Great Depression. My grandfather was career Navy (Chief Petty Officer) and a 33rd degree mason who valued savings accounts and education -- even in the bathroom cuz why waste time just sitting there, right? He lied about his age to get into the Navy during World War I and at points he was a mason, a prison work camp warden, a building inspector for the Veteran’s Administration and an all around hard-ass and self-educated man. I think he’d be fascinated by the educational opportunities and the wisdom-at-your-fingertips aspects of the internet as well as Craigslist and EBay for he was big on making do and buying second hand. My grandmother took great pleasure in sneaking a smoke (because they both gave it up sometime in 1950s), handing out quarters to her grandkids (all 25 of ‘em) and going to the movies behind my grandfather’s back. She would “diet” but was constantly taking us kids for a nickel cone or donut holes or (gasp) out for strawberry shortcake. She worked in a government office during WWII in a highly responsible but very secret capacity that I never did get the whole story on. Her dressing table with all of its potions and lotions was a wealth of mystery to me and provided me with endless hours of entertainment and sometimes mischief. She was a big time reader and nail biter … and as I write this it occurs to me that I must take after her. From what I remember about her, I think she’d be fascinated by microwaves, cuisinarts, and diaper genies, acrylic nails, progressive lenses, Nicotine gum, one-dose yeast infection cures, the morning after pill and gymnasiums designed exclusively for women. She was the first to pass away. I lost her the same winter I discovered drum corps – I was 12 and in the 8th grade. Her funeral was the first time I ever saw my father cry. I know my mother loved her as much or more than she did her own mother.

I find all them drifting through my meditations. Often my thoughts of them are clouded with regret --- you know, the I should haves and I could haves. I wish I’d been cognizant enough to have taken the time to know them better and appreciate them more and to learn more from them about them … and about me. Or that they’d left behind some kind of written history for me … hmmmm ... like a blog.




.