Living Large In Our Little House

The Little Bungalow where I grew up

 

I lost another influ­en­tial per­son from my child­hood this week.

My par­ents' good friend – the man who stood up at my chris­ten­ing and agreed to be my Godfather – passed away.

My Uncle Virg and Aunt Grace lived five doors up from us in that neigh­bor­hood of post-war bun­ga­lows. It was a rail­road town and every man on our side of the street worked for the railroad.

In the 60s, when my par­ents were best friends with them, we did every­thing together. Our fam­i­lies cel­e­brated birth­days and anniver­saries, home­com­ings from Vietnam for their older mil­i­tary sons and week­end bar-b-ques.

There isn’t an old 8mm home movie we have that doesn’t include them.

But it wasn’t all play; when our par­ents wanted to ren­o­vate or expand our lit­tle bun­ga­lows, the other fam­ily was there.

My mom always amus­ingly told the story of how she wanted to cover the stub­born orig­i­nal wall­pa­per on the walls in our liv­ing room. When my dad and Uncle Virg sur­veyed the walls and said it couldn’t be done, my mom said, “Aunt Grace and I sat there, waited for them to leave and then got up and did it.”

It was also my dad who helped them expand their lit­tle bun­ga­low up the street by help­ing Uncle Virg through sev­eral week­ends of hand-digging a basement.

My mother never admit­ted it, but I even believe that on some level, it was also their expe­ri­ence as mid-life par­ents that prompted my mother’s “acci­den­tal” preg­nancy with me.

Mike, their mid-life child, was born just three years before me and I think my mom, see­ing an empty nest loom­ing before her, really wanted to start again too.

Our fam­i­lies were so close that when my Aunt Grace’s mother came to visit, it was an event not just for her and her fam­ily, but for ours as well. “Grandma Quinn” became mine too, after my own died when I was just two.

We even vaca­tioned together.

They had one of those 1960s era great big green cars, some­thing we would refer to as a “boat” now, and I remem­ber a vaca­tion not too far from here, on Stockton Lake, in which my mother gath­ered a bunch of pretty lakebed rocks for her rock garden.

Uncle Virg and my dad loaded the rocks into the trunk of their huge green mon­ster of a car and the guys fol­lowed us girls home in our Ford Rambler.

My dad and Uncle Virg laughed for years about how the back of that car was prac­ti­cally drag­ging the high­way and they didn’t think it would make it home.

Their friend­ship wasn’t per­fect, there were minor tiffs and mis­un­der­stand­ings, but they always found their way back to each other’s liv­ing rooms for mid-morning cof­fee klatches.

When we moved from our lit­tle green bun­ga­low and my dad died, the sur­viv­ing three still remained close.

Not as close, maybe as when we were neigh­bors, but for the times it mattered.

Aunt Grace and Uncle Virg and my mother still saw each other, espe­cially for events such as wed­dings and mile­stone birth­days and not-so-happy events such as my brother’s funeral and later, Aunt Grace’s.

Uncle Virg was too ill by the time my mother passed away to be a pall­bearer, but I asked Mike to take the place of his father, as I know if Uncle Virg was able he would have wanted to be there for her for that final event.

Mike (who in child­hood, was like a brother to me) and I recon­nected a few years ago. Now, he and his wife, Charlotte (who also went to school with all of us), are two of our clos­est friends, just as our par­ents once were.

One of my last mem­o­ries of Uncle Virg was of the day Aunt Grace passed away. I pulled up to their house. He was begin­ning a descent into Alzheimer’s and I wasn’t sure he would rec­og­nize me.

After giv­ing me a long hug and say­ing, “It’s so good to see you, Kerri Sue,” I sat down in the warm sun­shine with him on the front porch. For the most part, we just sat in silence for a while. We were both too sad to say much of anything.

During the ensu­ing years, Mike gave us progress reports on his father’s health and even toward the end, sprin­kled in bits of his father’s humor that proved that awful dis­ease could some­times rob him of his mem­ory, but couldn't per­ma­nently steal his wit and humor.

In the end, he passed peace­fully; free of pain and not aware of the con­fu­sion that so often plagued his mind.

I imag­ine him now in the sun­shine, back with Aunt Grace, maybe even hav­ing a few laughs once again with my parents.

We were not rich in mate­r­ial things. We had very small houses in a neigh­bor­hood filled with blue col­lar fam­i­lies and small houses just like ours, but our fam­i­lies some­how all knew what liv­ing large was all about, and I would say that was espe­cially true for Uncle Virg.

I have all of them to thank, in part, for show­ing me how to make the most of my life too.

Do you have spe­cial influ­ences from your child­hood that helped shape your life?