late night whiskey sippings with the baton rouge/brotherghost crew turn into whataburger scarfing then just not being able to keep my eyes open any longer laying in the grass sort of thing. i wake up with the hangover i needed to go hang out with the dad and the gmom.
wake up early. get a call from opie in houston, who is moving to atlanta to work at a bike shop. i am so far removed from the bike community right now but it is awesome to get calls from people i love, despite only really having drinking and biking in common with them for the most part. i am planning a trip out there, maybe with john before he goes to australia, or maybe as a part of a tour with brother/ghost, who thinks i am their new drummer. which is awesome.
get to the gma's. she has some hot dogs ready for us and puts a cobbler in.
i never know what to talk about with my grandmothers. they are very different kinds of texas grandmothers from each other. munner, my mother's mother, is the traditional worrywart. the 80 year old who still drives in from abeline (in the north plains/lubbock neighborhood) and thinks when my sister has a zit that it is small pox. she's got 3 fake knees, no boobs, one hip replaced twice, and is more often than not too depressed to get out of bed all day. i have a hard time coming up with things to say because she wants great grandkids so bad, and actively hates mexican people. mexican people like my sister's long time boyfriend.
the other, the one i saw today, is a non-native hardass, still sharp as a tack, and has been cooking for my father the entire month that my mom has been in germany. i often have a hard time coming up with things to discuss with her because frankly, if she's not interested in whatever it is, she will stop talking about it. she has opinions and she could give a damn about yours. she can be hard to talk to because she is way smarter than me.
today, memorial day, she told my father and i the story of her brothers john and ed going to and coming back from WWII. they were both gone for 3 1/2 years, and for that long again in korea, but in WWII their communication was limited to severely censored letters, and the radio. she told us about how her parents sat next to the radio every night and cried, never knowing where their boys were. there were no home phones or tvs. the one time they got a telegram, it was to tell my great grandparents that ed had gone MIA. this is after 3 years of not receiving more than cut up letters. for 4 months there was no more news.
assumed dead.
then, news from england. the germans had a tactic of running over shot american soldiers with their tanks on the field. ed had shrapnel in his foot and crawled into an overgrown trench with a few fellow injured soldiers and were hidden until the medics arrived. he recovered fully but had been unable to contact his family or country until long after he had been rescued. his family had already received his personal affects. apparently, on the field, the soldiers who intuited that they weren't coming back would give their cash and trinkets to a buddy to mail back to his family. my great grandparents had received a box with a different mans handwriting on it, one of eddie's fellow soldier's.
her brothers somehow managed to come back at the same time (one from the navy, one the army) and she remembers running outside and not coming back inside for a long time. she was scared of these men that she had never met. they had been gone since before she could remember.
things are different now. our food is rationed, our gas isnt' rationed, our shoes aren't rationed. my great aunt apparently saved the metal clasps from her worn out bras until the day she died in 2007. memorial day stands for something for our grandparents. i collected some stories today.
dad style
me and the sis on her last day at frank.
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