Reminiscing

I spent the next few days socializing and reminiscing. My mom had been holding up well. My older brother Scott, his wife, and two girls had recently moved back to Bellingham and into my mom's six bedroom house. They had decided to ditch the rat race and high-powered jobs of city life, and move back to our little hometown to raise their daughters ... in the same house where he grew up! My mom is elated to little grandchildren around again. Curt & I lived next door to my mom & dad in Bellingham for fifteen years and she was able to be an integral part of our boys' childhoods. Inevitably, the boys grew up and we moved away, but now she can be uber-grandma again for Scott's two little girls, Gwen (9.9) and Sasha (8).

Besides Scott's family being there all the time now, there was also a revolving door of my boys and their girlfriends at the house. My #1 son lives in Bellingham with his girlfriend, as does the #2 son and his girlfriend. Both these boys have been invaluable help over the last 5 years as Grandpa's health was increasingly fragile. After Grandpa's stroke 6 months ago, they and their girlfriends began to help even more. They came over daily to transfer Grandpa from his bed to his wheelchair and back again. They also took out the garbage every week, and would babysit Grandpa so Grandma could go to church. In return, she had been feeding them a home-cooked dinner every Wednesday night, a welcome respite from the usual junk food diet of young men in their twenties. Now that Scott's family was living there, the boys had been coming even more often to play with the girls. And now that I was visiting, #1 son and #2 son had been coming over almost every day. #3 son lives in Portland, about 5 hours away, but he would arrive at Grandma's two days later. #4 son would arrive from Seattle a few days after that. It seemed like there would be 10-12 people every night for dinner. Luckily, Scott loves to cook and had taken on all the chef duties.

Anyway, there was plenty of socializing and reminiscing to be done and an ample number of people to do it with.

One of the things I did was dig out all of my dad's old newspaper columns. He wrote a bi-weekly column on the opinion page of the local newspaper, the Bellingham Herald, for 16 years. Occasionally he wrote about the Soviet Union because he was a Soviet history professor, after all. He also wrote some sentimental memoir-type columns. But most of all, he wrote about political issues, both local and national. Being at opposite ends of the political spectrum, I often had a difficult time reading his political columns. But I usually appreciated the sentimental ones. He wrote sweet ones about having his four grandsons growing up next door, about my mom's extended family who lived on the family farm in Illinois, and even about American diversions such as baseball and fireworks.

As we shared the collection of his columns, we delighted in reading Dad's own words, for it brought him back momentarily. We could all hear him complaining (repeatedly) about Clinton's lack of character, or ranting about some hare-brained local initiative. However, one of our favorite columns was the one about kids playing baseball in his side yard for the last 40 years. Because it was a corner lot, our side yard was the biggest expanse of grass on the block and therefore the preferred site for most neighborhood games of baseball, football, capture the flag or kick the can. First, my brothers and I and our friends wore a bare spot where home plate was located. Even after we grew up, other neighbor kids came to the side yard to play. When Curt & I moved in next door, my boys and their friends used the same spot for home plate. Now there's even a new set of grandchildren who can wear out the grass. His final line in that column was: "Perhaps it would be a fitting epitaph to note on my tombstone, 'He let the neighborhood kids play in his side yard.' It's probably the most important social contribution I've made in this life."