My other grandfather wasn’t at all curmudgeonly and I don’t think I ever saw him get mad. My grandmother recently told me a story, though, about the maddest she’d ever seen him.
One day Granddad came home from work and found me sitting on their front porch. I often walked there after school, and evidently on this day, their front door was locked. (Unusual – I grew up in a town where no one locked anything. I didn’t have a key until I went to college.) He opened the door and let me in, and I got a snack and my mom came to get me and we went home, and nothing was said about it. When my grandma came home, however, he let fly. “Don’t you ever lock that door and leave my granddaughter sitting on the porch, in the cold, again!” he said. He was mad. My grandma said she just couldn’t have felt worse about it.
I got a little teary when she told this story. Granddad wasn’t a grouch, but he was never overtly affectionate, either, and to hear this demonstration of how much he cared – well, it meant a lot to me.
On the other hand – I don’t remember this at all. I have no memory of being locked out of their house, of him coming to my rescue. (Although as my mom said when I told her about it – if it had happened, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me a bit, as long as I had a library book with me.) I even suspect that it may have happened to one of my siblings instead of me.
In the end it doesn’t matter. The moral of the story, the core of the memory, is that my granddad loved me – loved us. The details are unimportant.
One day Granddad came home from work and found me sitting on their front porch. I often walked there after school, and evidently on this day, their front door was locked. (Unusual – I grew up in a town where no one locked anything. I didn’t have a key until I went to college.) He opened the door and let me in, and I got a snack and my mom came to get me and we went home, and nothing was said about it. When my grandma came home, however, he let fly. “Don’t you ever lock that door and leave my granddaughter sitting on the porch, in the cold, again!” he said. He was mad. My grandma said she just couldn’t have felt worse about it.
I got a little teary when she told this story. Granddad wasn’t a grouch, but he was never overtly affectionate, either, and to hear this demonstration of how much he cared – well, it meant a lot to me.
On the other hand – I don’t remember this at all. I have no memory of being locked out of their house, of him coming to my rescue. (Although as my mom said when I told her about it – if it had happened, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me a bit, as long as I had a library book with me.) I even suspect that it may have happened to one of my siblings instead of me.
In the end it doesn’t matter. The moral of the story, the core of the memory, is that my granddad loved me – loved us. The details are unimportant.
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