So…since this is Sunday, I thought it might be an interesting weekly practice to spend it visiting the Church of the Wholey Bizarrely Insane. My family! Both sides of the aisle are filled with “B” movie scenarios that have been equal parts chuckles and tears for me.
Let’s start with the most colorful character in the family and I don’t really mean that in any way that is positive, my grandfather. He was born in Santander, a port city on a bay in the northern part of Spain and he smoked and drank his way through life until his death at eighty-two.
Gramps came from a wealthy Spanish family. They accumulated their fortune through fishing and then canning. Eventually they lost their fortune to Franco!
As was typical in wealthy Spanish Catholic families, someone had to become a priest. So in their collective wisdom the family determined Gramps to be the ONE! Understand now, he had no calling to this vocation and he wasn’t particularly devout, he was just the second son and not the heir to the fortune…so it made sense. Ha! At the time no one knew what a joke that was. Ironically, it was the heir who had the calling, so surprise of all surprises…no one was going to be happy.
So on to Seminary Gramps went. I can’t imagine his road was any too smooth as he always had the spirit of a rabble-rouser. He was incredibly smart and not much got by him so when he realized that the priests were doing more than praying with the nuns (hmmm, some foreshadowing there), he said “adios” to the seminary. The family was furious but this opened up the opportunity for the brother to do what he had felt called to do all along.
While the family fumed, the brother became a highly regarded priest who traveled through rural villages spreading the word. Of course, as I later came to learn, the world can be a dark and sad place where bad things happen. The brother, while visiting his congregation in inclement weather, contracted pneumonia and died. Let me tell you, the family immediately assigned the responsibility for this travesty on ol’ Gramps. This, in addition to his profound personal feelings of guilt, led him to hop a freighter to the US.
Upon his arrival to Ellis Island, he adopted the requisite misspelling of his surname and began his journey in the new world. As with most immigrants, he knew where to find his compadres, and southern Colorado called. He planned to ingratiate himself with the local Spaniards and identify a wealthy landowner with available daughters. In case you haven’t noticed he could be calculating and manipulative.
When the prettier, more desirable sister married another, he courted and married my shy, very inexperienced grandmother. Not that I’m knocking it, after all I might not be here if they hadn’t contributed to the gene pool. But I’m pretty sure she was woefully unprepared for what was to come.
I don’t know much about those first years I can only hope there was some measure of happiness. There were children, the first a boy, the second a girl with bright green eyes, and the third another girl who came early, very early, on a farm, with no doctor. She was so small and my dear old Gramps suggested that my grandmother was crazy to get too attached since the baby would die anyway. Yep, definitely a warm, sensitive, loving guy. But Grams was strong and smart and she put the baby in a drawer and surrounded her with milk bottles filled with warm water to keep her alive. Kind of a rustic incubator and voila, she survived!!! I am sooo grateful to my Grams as that baby was my mother. As always I’m completely in favor of the propagation of the family tree.
My grandfather ran the family like a boot camp with calisthenics in the yard, a vegetarian diet and only water for the kids and Grams (of course Gramps ate meat and drank whatever he wanted). My mother said he was like the the father in the original “Cheaper by the Dozen” but without any of the humor.
He made his impact felt in many ways over the years. When my mother was three, Grams went on a fast. She got the idea from a pamphlet espousing cleansing the body of toxins that Gramps had brought home. I guess she was just ahead of her time given the trend toward all kinds of cleansing we see today. Anyway, hers lasted for two months. Uh huh, you got it, that’s what the family says, two months without food.
The end of the fast came when she went into a coma (no real surprise there!). The story, depending on who tells it, is that either she became delirious with hunger and found some peanuts and ate them (Gramps” side) or Gramps tried to kill her by giving her peanuts (guess who’s side?). Whatever happened, she probably suffered an electrolyte imbalance maybe resulting in a stroke. She wound up in a coma and when she came out of it she had aphasia, meaning she would think one thing and say something else. In her case she called everyone by a number instead of their name. My mother was “44.” Crazy!
Gramps didn’t believe in doctors so he cared for her himself. When she developed terrible bed sores (one so bad you could see the bone), he built a sun porch on the back of the house and carried her up there everyday to dry them out. Unfortunately, because he didn’t know as much as he thought he did, as the sores healed, the tendons and muscles shrank and as a result her leg was shortened by several inches. Without medical care or physical therapy, she never walked again on her own. She was thirty-seven…
To come…death…and bootlegging… and deportation…oh my!
Some People’s Kids: Heartless. Arrogant. Too smart for their own good. Not suited for families…