Grandparents Four Good
A MEMOIRBy David M. TeeterAbbott Press
Copyright © 2012 David M. Teeter
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4582-0435-6Contents
Preface.............................................................viiTaking Notice.......................................................1Gramaul.............................................................10Grandpap............................................................41Grammy..............................................................102Bop-Bop.............................................................139A Preachy Afterword.................................................183Works Cited.........................................................192
Chapter One
Taking Notice
My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Reynolds, once surprised her class with a peculiar question. It wasn't the usual schoolroom interrogation, "How many syllables does it have?" or "Nine times eight for the last time is how much?" No, she asked us, "How many of you have four living grandparents?" Because my classmates and I had already learned that teachers didn't often ask personal questions, some of us maybe hesitated for a second. I most likely did. Though easily answered, the question caught us off guard. What is she getting at? Is she trying to trick us? But before we could fully formulate those vague suspicions to ourselves, many us found ourselves signaling in the traditional classroom way. Her low-pressure query sent our hands flying aloft, mine among them.
And she continued, asking the remainder of the class, "How many of you have three living grandparents?" Another clutch of energetic hands waved. Among the affirming groups she'd seen most of us respond; yet she didn't stop. "Two grandparents?" Fewer hands went up this time. "One grandparent?" Amazed, I saw a lone hand gesture in pitiful reply. Maybe Mrs. Reynolds had seen all of us answer by then, so she didn't ask about zero grandparents. Or maybe she didn't have the heart. She finished the exercise with an odd remark. "Those of you with four living grandparents don't know how lucky you are."
The unusual observation concentrated my weak eight-year-old attention. At that age I harbored a vague sense that I was lucky, and my teacher in her probing had confirmed that feeling for me. Still, I suspected I hadn't understood her motives for asking the question or her final intimation of good fortune. Her mysterious conclusion caused me to remember that day, meanwhile having forgotten almost everything else about the 1956-1957 school year in Greenbelt, Maryland, except that nine times eight is seventy-two. Even that operation seems grander now in its fundamental simplicity than my classmates and I then allowed.
At that age I knew that my grandparents could be found at opposite ends of the state, on farms. My dad's parents lived amid the Allegany Mountains near Flintstone, Maryland, just east of Cumberland, and my mom's parents across the Chesapeake Bay, near Ridgley. I knew that I resided in between, at the center, in the suburbs of Washington D.C. I could go in either direction, east or west, in order to reach one set of grandparents or the other. Of course my parents, two brothers, and two sisters would come along too. At that time we went as an incomplete family. My three unborn siblings had not yet appeared, but even without them, the family made intermittent trips to those outer grandparent bounds, to the sandy flatlands near the ocean, where the sun rose each day, or to the ancient eroded mountains, where it disappeared.
Grandparents, I knew, would welcome us at anytime. When we approached the home place where my Dad grew up, the road began to dip and wind, high and low, up to and often through the dizzy edge of carsickness. His mother, Gramaul, we called her, might have to silence the big, thick-necked dog that often threatened at our approach. When he maneuvered around to the side-porch by the driveway to begin barking, she would yell, "King! Hush!" The obedient mastiff would then droop, step back, and then tilt his black nose up into the air for the purpose of inspecting us, allowing our escape past the screen door to safety. Two sniffs from him and we'd be sitting in Gramaul's kitchen, invited by her "Come on in." Grandpap might be found in the living room smoking his pipe. His deep "hello" was slanted in the second syllable at a slightly higher pitch than the first, where more of the goodwill seemed to lodge. Larger effusions he let wait for later consideration. More reflective exchanges required special conditions, slackness and rigor at once. Before too long, Gramaul would be saying, "Sit up and eat."
Going in the other direction to eastern Maryland required another special blend of gasoline and Dramamine. Even so, some of my younger brothers and sisters might be clutching their retching cans before we reached the threshold of Grammy's back porch. There, the drift of enlivening aromas spurred resurrection. The essences in her cupboards presaged a link to an enchantment beyond ordinary places. The waft of spices had seemingly combined on their own initiative for the purpose of healing the exposed gut of the trip. Freer in her emotions than our mountain kin, Gammy Crouse came to us with a big smile, a cheering laugh, and often an embarrassing kiss. Bop-Bop, beside her, did the same but substituted a poke, tickle or pinch for the kiss. His daughter Lois, my mother, got the kiss too. Their greetings brimmed full like a pot bubbling over.
This convenient geographical balance appealed to my developing third-grade grasp of the world. The clear symmetry added to my latent sense that due proportion reigned in some fundamental way, as did the fact that I had an older brother by a year and a younger brother by a year. My two younger sisters, being babies, didn't disturb the rightness of the arrangement. By the time my two brothers and I could remember much of anything at all, we knew each grandparent home to be a haven of palpable familiarity yet charged with the attraction of strangeness. A teach place we anticipated wild possibility and outdoorsy discovery in a land green with secrets. Both farms offered oases set apart from the world's brick-and-mortar indifference. At both places people cared.
The fact that all my grandparents were of German-American ancestry didn't register with me in a big way until history became a subject in school, sometime in early adolescence. Much earlier, I had come to know that my dad had fought in Germany during World War II toward the defeat of the evil Hitler. Through overhearing remarks in casual conversation, supplemented by a scattershot of TV shows, I knew that Hitler had thumped the world like a great dragon and had only recently been put down. As a result, I'd come to attach a burgeoning feeling of pride for my father's part in the operation.
Once when I was five years old, just after we'd temporarily moved to the country, Dad came downstairs wearing his old army uniform, including the hat, with his deer rifle in hand. From the front porch he took silent aim into the distant cornrows. He neither fired the gun nor said much to the family, just smiled at our quiet, wide eyes. His action seemed to say, "Ha! I was a soldier once, deadly and grim. I can play with the nightmare now." Yet, there was more to his display, I knew, if I could see it. Typical of little kids who know more than they can tell, I must have tried to dredge the thoughts up at the time and failed. Looking back, I think my father was indicating to us, "Yes, I wanted to be home when I wore these clothes in faraway places. Now I am home, just as I'd wished."
The house where he grew up lay just beyond the trees at the horizon, where his parents still lived. Wearing the wooly uniform and feeling the heft of the weapon maybe brought the old ache for homecoming back to life again. Maybe he wanted to revisit the weight and pleasure of a dream's realization, the keen drop of it. By such a delayed action maybe he could secure some pieces of himself loosed in Europe. In Germany, the country of his ancestors, he'd made bridges and roads in advance of General Patton's army, and made sure that prisoners of war built their barracks snug. Some such memories must have visited him on the porch that day. Minutes later, Dad took the uniform off, never to don it again. When my brothers and I gave him a retrospective tome about World War Two full of photographs many years later for a Christmas present, he never touched it. Upon opening the gift, he set it aside, easy, like a gun that might go off. The memories not shed with the army clothes, we learned, had been enough. Germany had affected him profoundly. Over time, I came to notice some Old Country traits in both my parents, linked to their parents and their way of life.
With growth and attention, I could begin to sense something of the dogged drive for order that lodged in the bedrock of my grandparents' lives, hidden down and deep like a hidden seam of iron ore. Each farm was a lesson in the value of thrifty management, evident in the considered placement of houses in relation to barns, the eradication of weeds from gardens, and the taut stretches of barbwire around pastures. If not standing sentinel in the fields, greased machines waited in bare wooden sheds. Their subalterns, well-worn hand tools—shovels, hoes, mattocks, axes, and scythes—not yet retired when I came to know them, remained at the ready in quiet corners. Satisfied animals knew their places, and dirt was discouraged from obscuring the natural shine of things. Each homestead looked to the local Church of the Brethren for sustenance. There, the wisdom and sense for right living seeped into the skin with the rising summer humidity and Sunday hymns. The same lessons were driven further into the bone by slicing winter temperatures.
I associated the Church of the Brethren with my grandparents. The Church began to take shape after the most conservative members of German Baptist Brethren in America disassociated themselves from their more liberal congregants. For the Old Order Brethren, as the parent sect of German Baptist Brethren is now known, the 1881 decision to cull the upstarts from the gathering came after much wrangling in the two decades after the Civil War. The Old Order German Baptist Brethren balked at the slick promises of modern life, unconvinced by the new forms of education, technology, and entertainment. The Old Order even now remains leery. It holds to traditional forms of worship, some modeled on Jesus' last night on earth, notably, the holy kiss after Communion and footwashing.
None of my grandparents had yet been born at the time of that first split. Because the rejected liberal members of the church continued to disagree among themselves after the original division, the number of Brethren churches continued to proliferate. The Church of the Brethren that informed my grandparents' lives rose out of the continued flux, emerging at about the time they were learning to spell the name. Brethren groups have continued to proliferate since in numbers that appear to strain the resources of the English tongue. The Church of the Brethren today must be distinguished from the Brethren Church, the Fellowship of Grace Brethren Churches, and the Dunkard Brethren, among others. Some of these new groups remember the Old Order Brethren as a distant relative and the German Baptists before them. Other Brethren groups are "distinctly different," to use the phrase supplied by the Church of the Brethren historian Roger Sappington, including "the Moravians, the Plymouth Brethren, the United Brethren, and the Brethren in Christ or River Brethren." Technically, the Church of the Brethren did not exist before 1908, using the date supplied by Sappington, although some authorities write as if it did. Sydney Ahlstrom, to mention just one, lets the anachronism speak sometimes, as in this sentence: "Earliest of the organized pietist groups in America was the Church of the Brethren, also known as Dunkers, Tunkers, or Taufers."
As a child knowing nothing about Western schismatic history, the Church of the Brethren worked to my mind like a big greenhouse, whether in the grandparent East or in the grandparent West. For me, the light streamed through the stained-glass full and whole, illuminating the pew sitting, hymn singing and stentorian praying. And besides the incoming light, more happened in these churches than met the eye. Worship caused large invisible leaves to unfurl in each place. Quiet, ethereal blossoms opened up lush and vital. Though waiting for plants to grow might test the patience of a child past God's own infinity, I came to associate the overall satin lift offered on those Sunday mornings with lilies of the valley. My mother showed me the delicate white flowers and mottled leaves once on a hot day. Congregated in the cool shade, the lilies throve in low bunches. They huddled quietly like a troop of soft-breathing rabbits waiting out the heat, alert and deeply contented at once.
My mother planted the flowers herself. They grew on the same ground where my father had aimed the rifle into the cornfield as a mark of homecoming. This farm lay between the church and the home of my grandparent west, about a half mile either way. For my family in 1954, this farm proved to be a haven and convenient investment. We lived there for a year and a half while my father completed his doctorate in economics under the G.I. Bill at Georgetown University. The hilly ninety acres also gave my mother room enough to gestate her fifth child after suspending her music-teaching career during the baby boom of the Washington suburbs. My father, in the midst of graduate school, made the thrifty purchase a few years before our move there with financial help from his own father.
Dad often made it back to the farm on weekends from Georgetown. After traveling over a hundred and twenty miles, once through a hurricane, he plowed, cultivated corn, and made hay, often at night by the beams of tractor light. He managed to do enough work to keep a purebred herd of Hereford beef cattle growing. Starting with six cows and a bull in the early 50s, he increased their number to almost sixty over a five-year period. He'd already been working the farm by long distance for several years before we became part of it. During his absences, my Uncle Frankie, still in high school, managed things with youthful competence. Upon our move back to the suburbs just in time for a new school year, my parents, then with five kids in tow, sold all the cows. The sale yielded enough seed money to begin a new life. Dad took up employment as an economist for the Bureau of the Budget in Washington D.C. while Mom returned to music teaching. By the time we moved once more four years later to a more rural suburban location near Damascus, Maryland, she had given birth to another son. Michael then took Linda's place being the baby in the family. John and Barbara would follow later.
Our eighteen-month respite in the Flintstone hills meant that during my first-grade year I had gained the chance to see my mountain grandparents more often than previous opportunities allowed. For me, these frequent encounters increased again as it was my privilege to trek up the dirt road to get a half gallon of milk from Gramaul several times a week. Sometimes a brother accompanied me. Because our own single milk cow was slowly drying up, we could not rely on her for adequate supply. I knew because it had been my duty to squeeze the big, languid creature empty every morning. Amid the warming sun and the circling flies, she docilely chewed her cud by the front gate. In a great show of patience she tolerated my small hands working hard at the extraction. When her largesse finally failed, I relished going to my grandmother's to fetch the difference between supply and demand.
Otherwise, for the rest of the day my two brothers and I grew like toads in the summer heat, turned brown, played in the creek, and heard the whippoorwills calling at night. We didn't wear much clothing but for the winter months, and then we arrayed ourselves in hand-me-downs that mysteriously showed up in boxes from relatives who'd outgrown the jetsam. And we lived on food grown in the garden. There, my mother killed a snake once after my brothers and I had come upon it pulling weeds. Black as coal with a flicking pink tongue, the snake revealed a love of life as big as ours, evident in its valiant attempt to escape a lethal thrashing.
Mom often voiced that love of life for us. She exclaimed over the beauty of Baltimore Orioles, Scarlet Tanagers, Queen Anne's lace and black-eyed Susans. She marveled at the sunsets and pointed out the rabbit in the moon. Or she'd mention a singer or composer, Kate Smith, Gershwin, Beethoven. On the phonograph she'd play "Peter and the Wolf," if we asked, or "Porgy and Bess," or Christmas carols in due season. We had few records. Playing in the creek came to a bigger event when she went along with a book to read while we splashed and skipped rocks. We might hear a name connected with the reading, an author linked to some of my father's studies maybe. Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Shakespeare I first heard mentioned then.
On dry land and barefoot, we roamed the farm with the brown dog our dad brought home one night, a big event. We were rustled out of bed to greet her in the kitchen. My older brother Ben—then using his middle name, Ronnie—called her Brownie; my younger brother, Larry, and I followed his lead. Brownie had lots of puppies that met a variety of tragic ends. The survivors we betrayed to the pound when we left the hills upon our return to the suburbs. In addition to showing great beauty, life sometimes showed a hard edge at Flintstone.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Grandparents Four Goodby David M. Teeter Copyright © 2012 by David M. Teeter. Excerpted by permission of Abbott Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
