I know next to nothing about my father’s father. I know that he grew up on a farm somewhere in Kansas where they raised rabbits. My father told me that he had a pet rabbit that once and his father made him skin it and they ate it for dinner one day. He was very abusive; beat the crap out of my dad a lot. Growing up, my father not once laid a hand on me, he left that up to my mother
. When my father was a teen his mother divorced him and they moved out to California. Yeah the guy was a asshole of the worst kind.
I didn’t know my father’s mother too well either. She lived about 200 miles away, and I think they had a pretty rocky relationship. I have no idea what she did for a living. My father’s youngest brother had quadruple bypass surgery when I was seven. There was a life or death decision to be made. My grandmother sided with one side of the family and my father sided with my uncle’s wife, causing a split throughout the family, that still stand today over 20 years later. I never saw my grandmother alive again. She died five years later. Her funeral was the first one I ever went to. I just remember thinking who is this woman?
My mother was originally from the East coast and I grew up on the West Coast, so I never got to know her parents too well. I know my grandfather fought in WWI as a radio man. Later he worked for the FBI as an accountant in a Washington suburb. I don’t have a lot of memories of him, but he was a very kind man. That was always nice to me, and my sisters. The man ran 6 miles everyday, and when he turned 80 his eyesight went bad so he did those 6 miles running small loops in the basement. My grandmother is the only one of my four grandparents that is left alive. She just turned 90 last month. She is the quintessential idea of what a American grandmother should be. I think she must have been the inspiration for Normal Rockwell. I know that she worked as a bookkeeper, and worked with computers punching computer cards in the 50s or 60s.