DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR GRANDPARENTS? GREATS? ANY MEMORIES?

I remember our family going to Grandma Flint’s apartment in Long Beach, CA and having a tuna and sometimes chicken casserole dinner with her. She always treated us well. Sometimes she’d know we were coming months in advance and she’d save all her pennies and when we got there she’d divide them up equally between my siblings and me. I remember looking at her hands in her lap when she spoke and seeing how gnarled with arthritis and old age they were. I remember her glasses, oh so thick, they made her look like she had bug eyes. My Grandma Flint loved me. I knew that.

I remember Grandpa Flint coming over to our house in Louisville, KY. He would have a brown paper bag in his hand. He would let me sit on his lap and would give me a cookie for each hand and Bobby would get one cookie. He didn’t get another one until I had finished one of my cookies. My Grandpa Flint loved me.

I don’t remember any of their parents.

I remember our family going to visit Grandma and Grandpa Nelson. On the way down dad would go on and on about how we were kids, and we should be seen and not heard. We couldn't touch anything. Grandma and Grandpa were getting older and we had to be careful around them. Because they were getting older we couldn't be loud. We kids would have to sit very still on the couch. We weren’t allowed to speak or get up or ask any questions. When dinner was ready, we sat at the table and used our best manners and enjoyed a wonderful fairytale like feast.

I was allowed once to spend the night at Grandma & Grandpa Nelson’s. That was a special treat. She was appalled that I didn’t have a ‘nice’ change of clothes to wear so she took me to JCPenney’s and bought me a new blouse. That may have been one of the first brand new articles of clothing I had ever had since I was a baby! It was a tropical print with green and orange in it, or at least, those are the colors I think it was.

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