On the Road Again

It is going to be one busy weekend. We are off to Canton to visit a friend of D's on Saturday and then some family Saturday evening and then to my parents near Cleveland that evening. Sunday is my grandfather's memorial. He was 2 weeks past his 98th birthday when he died. He will be missed. 98 is an incredibly long life which he put a lot of living into. Before my grandmother died gpa was just a quite man who was with gma. After she died he opened himself up a bit more to us grandkids and the rest of the family I think. A few years after she died he and my father took a trip to Florida to visit the places he had seen on his honeymoon. I always thought that was so sweet, that he wanted to visit those places again. This turned into a yearly tradition for my father and grandfather. They would take a month and drive down to Florida. After the first couple of years of staying at places which held fond memories, but might not be the nicest places any longer they started renting condo's on the beach for their trips. Gpa would spend the day walking on the beach and as he got less mobile, sitting on the pier watching people fish. These trips lasted up until he was 96. I look forward to that longevity. Gpa always with it mentally, with the exception of the story about the gas and the break. He loved to tell how he decided at 90 years old to give up driving. He had enough friends and neighbors (he was still living in his own home at this time) who wanted to take him places that he no longer needed to drive himself and within a period of about 6 months he claims to have witnessed 5 incedences where drivers confused the gas and break pedals. The most shocking was the elderly gentelman who drove through the barbershop window just after gpa walk out of it. It was enough for gpa to learn from others mistakes than to make them on his own.

When gpa was in a good mood I liked to get him to talk about how he met my gma. They were at a wedding together and she was one of the brides maids and he was a guest. He says that the moment he saw her he knew that she was the one for him. Sometimes he will also talk about his trip to California. He started out in a Ford of some kind and it broke down in Salt Lake City, so he found the Hobo camp. At the camp they told him how ride the trains. He rode out to California and worked on an Almond farm picking Almonds for about 6 months. The people wanted him to stay on, but he had become so homesick he was ready to head home. He had worked enough on the farm to buy a passanger ticket on the train home and didn't have to hop on for his ride back. Sometimes he would talk about how when my dad was a kid, they got an egg incubator from someplace and loaded it full of eggs. The problem was that they didn't think about how many chickens that would yeild and since it was winter, once the eggs hatched they had a room just full of chicks. This always leads dad to say "Mom, sure made good chicken and dumplings!"

Sunday will be a day of sharing these and other fond memories of my grandfather with friends and family. He will be missed, but no one can say that his life was cut short! He was ready at the end to see my grandmother again and I believe passed with peace in his heart.