Retro-Blog 1987 (age 24): A Childhood Memory

A MEMORABLE ROTOTILLER

At some point in my preadolescent life my maternal Grandfather died.  As with other family deaths, there was a great pilgrimage to the scene of the death.   Aunts and uncles and cousins from all over Oregon loaded into their full-size early-seventies family cars and made the long hot nonstop to rural Colorado.

The ending of his long and colorful life was commemorated by a twenty-one gun salute fired by octogenarian veterans.    Even though I scarcely remembered ever meeting him,  I did manage to force a few tears, being under the influence of all the sincerely portrayed sorrow around me.

As my critically-wounded step-grandmother lay in the intensive-care unit of the local hospital, my aunts and uncles set themselves to the task of remembering.    The process of remembrance in my family consists primarily of the acquisition of objects once owned by the deceased to serve as "something to remember him by".    Thanks to the generosity of one of my aunts, I had the opportunity to remember this grandfather I never knew with his wife's gold pocket watch to assist me in the task of fond recollection.   Back in Oregon, however, my mother coerced me into surrendering the watch in exchange for a gas-powered model airplane, the result of some rather persistent negotiation on my part.

My grandfather died in a high-speed head-on collision while delivering a load of gallon jars of honey in his VW van.    One small irony is that he was illegally driving while legally blind at night, yet it was the other driver who had strayed into his lane.   While viewing a newspaper photo of the remains of the vehicle, my aunt Alma remembered that her father had once mentioned that he liked to keep a hundred-dollar bill taped inside the dashboard to be available in case of emergency.  So she went to the wrecking yard and had them pry apart the smashed honey and blood encrusted dashboard, only to find that the treasure was already gone or perhaps had never been there.

Undaunted by this disappointment, my aunt rented a U-Haul trailer to carry enough inspiration for a lifetime of fond memories.   After returning to Oregon,  she discovered that she had inadvertently remembered her dead father by the rototiller he had recently borrowed from his neighbor.

[Editorial Note 2015 (age 52): This is one of those things written specifically for the "I" collection mentioned in my notes on a previous blog.  Since my collected works at that time provided virtually no information about my poorly remembered childhood, I attempted to provide what few anecdotal reports I could.  By the way, the phrase "octogenarian veterans" was far too seductively quasi-alliterative to resist, despite the fact that my grandfather and his peers firing the rifles were more likely in their 60s at the time.]