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When I was little I'd be sent to Illinois for several weeks in the summer. Mom needed a vacation, or she and dad wanted to battle out their differences in private, whatever. I'd spend part of that with my mom's parents in the real HomeTown, with its Norman Rockwell postcard streets, in their perfect house and manicured lawn, playing by myself as a knight-princess errant of the stone table in the garden and exploring a basement full of antiques and treasures. An only child, only grandchild, and only-neice I was getting no shortage of attention.
Then, with inevitable abruptness I'd be transferred over to my father's parents, on a farm miles from everywhere. The house was always a mess and to this day my grandmother's housekeeping is a family joke, which was hard to adjust to when you had spent weeks with my other grandmother whose house was visited by a housekeeper and was kept neat enough to shame June Cleaver. Corn fields and gravel roads stretched out for as far as a child could comprehend. The yard was huge, there were fruit trees behind the house, satisfyingly decrepit barns and hog houses and grainbins to explore, a really big rock in the front yard, and there were my cousins, Mikey and Chunk, and Jackie. Mikey was the oldest by two months, followed by Jack, and then me a month after him. Stairstep cousins gave us a ready-made playgroup and we were happily self-sufficient until Chunk got old enough we were expected to play with him.
My life could have been awful since I was the only girl in the group, but lucky for me, Mike, Jack and I were usually united by the shared disdain for Chunk who was younger by two years and Grandma's pet. Not that we didn't include him but if someone was getting picked on it was usually him, and usually it was because Grandma had told us not to. Poor Chunk, he was a chubby tubby baby and it just never went away. Worse, Grandma never said no to him. While this occasionally came in handy, mostly it just annoyed the rest of us.
But you couldn't spend all summer trying to get Chunk into trouble. A good game was seeing how close we could get to climbing on the oil wells before we got caught. Or climbing the barn, the silo, the grain bins, the trees... Playing King of the Mountain on the giant rock that occupied a place of honor in the yard (to this day the score is Kids: 0, Rock: 20000 scrapes and bruised elbows)... Making impromptu ramps for BigWheels and later on, bikes... daring each other into stupid stuff, eating veggies out of the garden and ransacking grandpa's fruit trees: in general running wild and spending entire days coming up with dangerous things to do and not getting our necks broken. And, for Jack and I, avoiding Grandma as much as possible. Neither of us were her favorite grandkids, and we knew it. Life was easier if we stayed outside, or begged Grandpa to take us on errands to town or to the neighbors or anywhere Grandma wouldnt get ahold of us.
My paternal grandfather is someone I've adored since approximately birth; Grandpa Vader is taller than dad, and in my memories he's bigger than everything in any given room. The cadence to his voice telling a story, his laugh, his old stripey-overalls and they way he didn't mind being a jungle gym for my cousins and me when we were little.... If you asked my childhood self what Aslan sounded like, or who Zeus looked like, it was Grandpa.
Grandma could scream at us and have us cowed but Grandpa could use a look and we'd be in perfect form instantly. I never remember him being mad- we never wanted to push it- but Mikey can attest he did have an end to his patience. He and his brother actually got a spanking, something confided to Jack and I in hushed tones of shame in the safety of the old barn later in the summer. It took him three times telling it before I'd believe it because Grandpa never got mad. You'd have to murder somebody, right? Apparently, Mike assured me, it really just took climbing up on top of the the old hog shelter and trying to ride your bike on the roof.
Grandma was a figure of fear and uncertainty but Granpa was mythic. We knew he'd been in WW2 but he didn't talk about it, that he'd been a paratrooper, that he'd married grandma even though her parents didn't like the idea. He had houses in different places and land in different places and if he wasn't busy he'd probably be asleep on the big chair. He called Mikey and Chunk's mom 'princess.' But most impressively: He could overrule Grandma. For us that sealed the deal- no one argued with Grandma, not our moms or dads or aunts or uncles. Nobody but Grandpa, and he would almost never enter into the fray.
Part of our problem was we never understood Grandma's rules- what would pass one day would earn you a spanking the next, and a nice sweet grandma one hour might be a shrieking harpy the next. Grown up, I can see why she was like this: combined, the four of us were hyper, into everything, and carried on in a pitched wave of activity and squabbling that would drive anyone batty, and a whole store couldn't have stocked enough bandaids to keep us supplied. At the time, however, it just meant we were careful to keep whatever we could out of her line of sight, especially if 'whatever we could' included Chunk tied up in jump ropes and chained to a tractor tire/ sacrificial alter, and Jack presiding as a pagan priest with one of Grandma's slips on his head.
I had long ago won the argument that although I was The Girl, and would accept having to walk the plank first in any games involving Captain Hook, I was better at hitting Mikey with a sticksword and should therefore be excused from Ritual Sacrifices. Besides if we got bored we could leave Chunk at the alter and amuse ourselves until Grandma found him or we let him out. Besides, Mike and Jack would get too involved in Epic Battles and forget to rescue you from the Dread Prison of The Loading Chute, and any princess was going to steal a raygun from the guards and get herself loose long before they remembered to.
And you always had to let Mike be The Hero because if he was Evil, he'd sulk if he lost. And Jack always wanted to be either Hero or Villain because he wanted to be an actor and he had experience because he sometimes played stuff with the community theater, so he was good at making up lines. Being The Girl meant I had to be kidnapped/menaced and Mike wasn't any good at getting in position to be oblingly knocked over the head so I could escape. And usually Chunk was just happy we let him play so he didn't mind being the Doomed Sidekick. He'd get mad if we didn't make him seem important though, so sometimes he was Vice-Arch-Evil-Nemesis with Bonus Tupperware Helmet.
I preferred the times when I could talk Mike into playing The Girl for a bit, but I didn't like riding the BigWheel off of the ramps (a prerequisite for being a good Hero), so I relinquished the role with only a bit of sulking.
From what I recall we played a mish-mash of He-Man, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Peter Pan, Robin Hood and GI JOE. Later on there were periods of manic devotion to X-Men, and a summer where Mike refused to play anyone but Han Solo so we had Han Solo in Neverland and Han Solo Saves Camelot, but things usually worked themselves out. The boys were amenable to even playing out weddings provided something would blow up partway through. Dramatic scenes of amnesia and recovery were also featured (we'd desperately settled for watching soap operas on rainy days since there were 3 channels and no vcr), and a memorable round of Hospital where I was married to Mike and then discovered that I was married to Jack but he had amnesia and had become an evil Sith Jedi. Of course he suddenly recovered and fought a duel with Mike, which Mike won by shooting Jack (he liked to die dramatically with lingering death scenes), but I killed myself out of grief, so as not to be outdone by a boy in Dramatic Death Scene Drama. Chunk, as a kindly Witch Doctor revived both of us as Frankensteins and we played Zombie Tag (like Freeze Tag but you had to grab the other person's head and once you're frozen you count to ten and turn into a zombie, really just a good excuse to chase Chunk through the house) until Grandma demanded we stop yelling "BRAAAAAIINS" and go outside.
X-Men games were only fun because I got to be Jean Grey AND Phoenix. Usually at the same time. Unfortunately I had to be married to Mikey who would only play Cyclops. That debate got settled when I took up playing Rogue and insisted that Gambit/Jack and I broke up. Finally I gave up and played Mystique, which was best of all because you could always say "But you can't tell it's me! I look like.... a TABLE." Jack took up Nightcrawler on similar grounds: "I WAS there, but now! I'm over... HERE!" So Mike took up Professor X: "Can too see you! I hear your brain!"
Playing X-Men always ended with everyone stealing everyone else's powers and getting fed up with everyone else being Everything-Powered and no one talking to each other until after lunch, when we'd go back to playing Peter Pan and agreeing that Peter Pan could not have lightening powers, and the bitterest fight would be which boy was going to be Peter and for how long.
Sometimes the boys did decide that I was A Girl and therefore couldn't be played with. Usually it ended with me storming into the house because they were boring anyway and I had plenty of more exciting books and dolls and stupid boys were stupid. That, or I'd pull Mike's hair and hit him in the stomach and be sentenced to the house for making him cry and calling him a girlyboy. Jack would get sick of Mike and Chunk's arguing and come in and get a book pretty soon afterward anyway. He and I were both only children and we tended to fight with each other much less than we fought with the others and we were both bewildered at the way Chunk and Mikey could squabble for hours almost without taking a breath between yells, and we both respected books, which to Mikey were mostly good as stuff to stack up as a wall for indoor forts, and Chunk ignored entirely.
I don't talk much about all of them, or all of Dad's family in general. Dad had mixed feelings about his parents anyway (and tended to call grandma "the old bitch" when he thought kids weren't listening). Things were complicated, and after mom and dad's divorce it just got more complicated. Jack's parents divorced suddenly soon after mine did, and I didn't see much of Grandma and Grandpa Vader after that. It didn't help that I found out about my older siblings, which no one in the family had let slip for 13 years of my life. I asked Mikey and Jack if they'd known about them and got sheepish looks. "Yeah, Mom and Aunt Elle said 'They're your cousins. And they're Summer's cousins too...'" "We thought it was weird, y'know, of course they're your cousins if they're our's, but... just thought it was them being weird."
At least Grandma likes my stepmom, so she's much nicer to my little sister. Plus, Autumn's never spent much time at their house, and age has finally mellowed Grandma's temper a little... and Autumn's much more normal than I was. She's more literal and reality-based, and would die if you suggested playing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Sacrificial Cousins.
But I'm writing this now becauseGrandpa had a stroke last year, which left him unable to speak. Or rather, to speak clearly. It's a game of charades, because he talks without making many clear words still, but his voice has the cadences and tones we all grew up hearing- we can hear the story or the question or the comment but it's all in some langauge we can't get. He still laughs though, still gets jokes and recognizes us and I feel a little awful because I'm just so relieved he's still in there. I don't care if he's got to relearn to speak, that's fine, it's rough but the idea of Grandpa-who-isn't-Grandpa scared me to death. He seemed clearer this weekend than the last time I'd seen him, and I thought at least there were more words coming out clearly.
His expression is still his, and even if communication is a problem, that can get better.... meanwhile, Jack and Chunk and Mike and I are all finding ourselves trying to picture the world with a grandpa-shaped void. Our parents are sorting things out, planning and doing their best to get home more often, figure out what might happen and what should be done 'if'....
Mikey has a daughter of his own now, and he's determined to be a good dad, even if he messes up every other thing and maybe she'll see him the way he saw Grandpa... Jack writes songs for his band, about summers and games and heroes that take up all the space in a room... Chunk finally stuck with a job so he can make sure to get out to Grandma and Grandpa's often enough to help with the dogs and the yard and all the responsible things he'd tried to avoid for so long... and I'm taking up the keyboard and pen and paper to find the words to write the story we made for ourselves. So grandpa can see us be ok, be grown ups, be kids he put up with and patched up and lectured and comforted and told stories to and sang for and he can know we'll be people he can be proud of.
Then, with inevitable abruptness I'd be transferred over to my father's parents, on a farm miles from everywhere. The house was always a mess and to this day my grandmother's housekeeping is a family joke, which was hard to adjust to when you had spent weeks with my other grandmother whose house was visited by a housekeeper and was kept neat enough to shame June Cleaver. Corn fields and gravel roads stretched out for as far as a child could comprehend. The yard was huge, there were fruit trees behind the house, satisfyingly decrepit barns and hog houses and grainbins to explore, a really big rock in the front yard, and there were my cousins, Mikey and Chunk, and Jackie. Mikey was the oldest by two months, followed by Jack, and then me a month after him. Stairstep cousins gave us a ready-made playgroup and we were happily self-sufficient until Chunk got old enough we were expected to play with him.
My life could have been awful since I was the only girl in the group, but lucky for me, Mike, Jack and I were usually united by the shared disdain for Chunk who was younger by two years and Grandma's pet. Not that we didn't include him but if someone was getting picked on it was usually him, and usually it was because Grandma had told us not to. Poor Chunk, he was a chubby tubby baby and it just never went away. Worse, Grandma never said no to him. While this occasionally came in handy, mostly it just annoyed the rest of us.
But you couldn't spend all summer trying to get Chunk into trouble. A good game was seeing how close we could get to climbing on the oil wells before we got caught. Or climbing the barn, the silo, the grain bins, the trees... Playing King of the Mountain on the giant rock that occupied a place of honor in the yard (to this day the score is Kids: 0, Rock: 20000 scrapes and bruised elbows)... Making impromptu ramps for BigWheels and later on, bikes... daring each other into stupid stuff, eating veggies out of the garden and ransacking grandpa's fruit trees: in general running wild and spending entire days coming up with dangerous things to do and not getting our necks broken. And, for Jack and I, avoiding Grandma as much as possible. Neither of us were her favorite grandkids, and we knew it. Life was easier if we stayed outside, or begged Grandpa to take us on errands to town or to the neighbors or anywhere Grandma wouldnt get ahold of us.
My paternal grandfather is someone I've adored since approximately birth; Grandpa Vader is taller than dad, and in my memories he's bigger than everything in any given room. The cadence to his voice telling a story, his laugh, his old stripey-overalls and they way he didn't mind being a jungle gym for my cousins and me when we were little.... If you asked my childhood self what Aslan sounded like, or who Zeus looked like, it was Grandpa.
Grandma could scream at us and have us cowed but Grandpa could use a look and we'd be in perfect form instantly. I never remember him being mad- we never wanted to push it- but Mikey can attest he did have an end to his patience. He and his brother actually got a spanking, something confided to Jack and I in hushed tones of shame in the safety of the old barn later in the summer. It took him three times telling it before I'd believe it because Grandpa never got mad. You'd have to murder somebody, right? Apparently, Mike assured me, it really just took climbing up on top of the the old hog shelter and trying to ride your bike on the roof.
Grandma was a figure of fear and uncertainty but Granpa was mythic. We knew he'd been in WW2 but he didn't talk about it, that he'd been a paratrooper, that he'd married grandma even though her parents didn't like the idea. He had houses in different places and land in different places and if he wasn't busy he'd probably be asleep on the big chair. He called Mikey and Chunk's mom 'princess.' But most impressively: He could overrule Grandma. For us that sealed the deal- no one argued with Grandma, not our moms or dads or aunts or uncles. Nobody but Grandpa, and he would almost never enter into the fray.
Part of our problem was we never understood Grandma's rules- what would pass one day would earn you a spanking the next, and a nice sweet grandma one hour might be a shrieking harpy the next. Grown up, I can see why she was like this: combined, the four of us were hyper, into everything, and carried on in a pitched wave of activity and squabbling that would drive anyone batty, and a whole store couldn't have stocked enough bandaids to keep us supplied. At the time, however, it just meant we were careful to keep whatever we could out of her line of sight, especially if 'whatever we could' included Chunk tied up in jump ropes and chained to a tractor tire/ sacrificial alter, and Jack presiding as a pagan priest with one of Grandma's slips on his head.
I had long ago won the argument that although I was The Girl, and would accept having to walk the plank first in any games involving Captain Hook, I was better at hitting Mikey with a sticksword and should therefore be excused from Ritual Sacrifices. Besides if we got bored we could leave Chunk at the alter and amuse ourselves until Grandma found him or we let him out. Besides, Mike and Jack would get too involved in Epic Battles and forget to rescue you from the Dread Prison of The Loading Chute, and any princess was going to steal a raygun from the guards and get herself loose long before they remembered to.
And you always had to let Mike be The Hero because if he was Evil, he'd sulk if he lost. And Jack always wanted to be either Hero or Villain because he wanted to be an actor and he had experience because he sometimes played stuff with the community theater, so he was good at making up lines. Being The Girl meant I had to be kidnapped/menaced and Mike wasn't any good at getting in position to be oblingly knocked over the head so I could escape. And usually Chunk was just happy we let him play so he didn't mind being the Doomed Sidekick. He'd get mad if we didn't make him seem important though, so sometimes he was Vice-Arch-Evil-Nemesis with Bonus Tupperware Helmet.
I preferred the times when I could talk Mike into playing The Girl for a bit, but I didn't like riding the BigWheel off of the ramps (a prerequisite for being a good Hero), so I relinquished the role with only a bit of sulking.
From what I recall we played a mish-mash of He-Man, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Peter Pan, Robin Hood and GI JOE. Later on there were periods of manic devotion to X-Men, and a summer where Mike refused to play anyone but Han Solo so we had Han Solo in Neverland and Han Solo Saves Camelot, but things usually worked themselves out. The boys were amenable to even playing out weddings provided something would blow up partway through. Dramatic scenes of amnesia and recovery were also featured (we'd desperately settled for watching soap operas on rainy days since there were 3 channels and no vcr), and a memorable round of Hospital where I was married to Mike and then discovered that I was married to Jack but he had amnesia and had become an evil Sith Jedi. Of course he suddenly recovered and fought a duel with Mike, which Mike won by shooting Jack (he liked to die dramatically with lingering death scenes), but I killed myself out of grief, so as not to be outdone by a boy in Dramatic Death Scene Drama. Chunk, as a kindly Witch Doctor revived both of us as Frankensteins and we played Zombie Tag (like Freeze Tag but you had to grab the other person's head and once you're frozen you count to ten and turn into a zombie, really just a good excuse to chase Chunk through the house) until Grandma demanded we stop yelling "BRAAAAAIINS" and go outside.
X-Men games were only fun because I got to be Jean Grey AND Phoenix. Usually at the same time. Unfortunately I had to be married to Mikey who would only play Cyclops. That debate got settled when I took up playing Rogue and insisted that Gambit/Jack and I broke up. Finally I gave up and played Mystique, which was best of all because you could always say "But you can't tell it's me! I look like.... a TABLE." Jack took up Nightcrawler on similar grounds: "I WAS there, but now! I'm over... HERE!" So Mike took up Professor X: "Can too see you! I hear your brain!"
Playing X-Men always ended with everyone stealing everyone else's powers and getting fed up with everyone else being Everything-Powered and no one talking to each other until after lunch, when we'd go back to playing Peter Pan and agreeing that Peter Pan could not have lightening powers, and the bitterest fight would be which boy was going to be Peter and for how long.
Sometimes the boys did decide that I was A Girl and therefore couldn't be played with. Usually it ended with me storming into the house because they were boring anyway and I had plenty of more exciting books and dolls and stupid boys were stupid. That, or I'd pull Mike's hair and hit him in the stomach and be sentenced to the house for making him cry and calling him a girlyboy. Jack would get sick of Mike and Chunk's arguing and come in and get a book pretty soon afterward anyway. He and I were both only children and we tended to fight with each other much less than we fought with the others and we were both bewildered at the way Chunk and Mikey could squabble for hours almost without taking a breath between yells, and we both respected books, which to Mikey were mostly good as stuff to stack up as a wall for indoor forts, and Chunk ignored entirely.
I don't talk much about all of them, or all of Dad's family in general. Dad had mixed feelings about his parents anyway (and tended to call grandma "the old bitch" when he thought kids weren't listening). Things were complicated, and after mom and dad's divorce it just got more complicated. Jack's parents divorced suddenly soon after mine did, and I didn't see much of Grandma and Grandpa Vader after that. It didn't help that I found out about my older siblings, which no one in the family had let slip for 13 years of my life. I asked Mikey and Jack if they'd known about them and got sheepish looks. "Yeah, Mom and Aunt Elle said 'They're your cousins. And they're Summer's cousins too...'" "We thought it was weird, y'know, of course they're your cousins if they're our's, but... just thought it was them being weird."
At least Grandma likes my stepmom, so she's much nicer to my little sister. Plus, Autumn's never spent much time at their house, and age has finally mellowed Grandma's temper a little... and Autumn's much more normal than I was. She's more literal and reality-based, and would die if you suggested playing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Sacrificial Cousins.
But I'm writing this now becauseGrandpa had a stroke last year, which left him unable to speak. Or rather, to speak clearly. It's a game of charades, because he talks without making many clear words still, but his voice has the cadences and tones we all grew up hearing- we can hear the story or the question or the comment but it's all in some langauge we can't get. He still laughs though, still gets jokes and recognizes us and I feel a little awful because I'm just so relieved he's still in there. I don't care if he's got to relearn to speak, that's fine, it's rough but the idea of Grandpa-who-isn't-Grandpa scared me to death. He seemed clearer this weekend than the last time I'd seen him, and I thought at least there were more words coming out clearly.
His expression is still his, and even if communication is a problem, that can get better.... meanwhile, Jack and Chunk and Mike and I are all finding ourselves trying to picture the world with a grandpa-shaped void. Our parents are sorting things out, planning and doing their best to get home more often, figure out what might happen and what should be done 'if'....
Mikey has a daughter of his own now, and he's determined to be a good dad, even if he messes up every other thing and maybe she'll see him the way he saw Grandpa... Jack writes songs for his band, about summers and games and heroes that take up all the space in a room... Chunk finally stuck with a job so he can make sure to get out to Grandma and Grandpa's often enough to help with the dogs and the yard and all the responsible things he'd tried to avoid for so long... and I'm taking up the keyboard and pen and paper to find the words to write the story we made for ourselves. So grandpa can see us be ok, be grown ups, be kids he put up with and patched up and lectured and comforted and told stories to and sang for and he can know we'll be people he can be proud of.
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