Great Grandpa's Day

March 17 is, of course, St. Patrick's Day (here in Suffolk Co., Mass., it's also--wink wink, nudge nudge--Evacuation Day). St. Paddy's Day has always been Great-Grandpa Higgins' Day, regardless of whether or not it's really his birthday, as he claimed.

I know I'm the only one of my sisters with any real memories of our great grandfather, who was a true character. When I was seven or eight, my mother pulled up outside the post office, gave me some cash, and told me to go in and get so many first class stamps. "If they give you any trouble," she said, "tell them Patrick Higgins is your great-grandfather."  Apparently, the staff of that particular post office had a reputation for mouthing off to customers, and my great-grandfather gave them back every bit as good as he got.

Grandpa's been dead 25 years or so, and my mother goes out to the gravesite every year on St. Paddy's Day (the day grandpa chose to celebrate his birthday), pours a beer on the grave, and asks grandpa to consider pulling some strings at the lottery.

He had bristly, close trimmed hair that was all silver. Apparently, his hair had gone completely silver by the time he was thirty.

His wife actually died after him, though she'd been institutionalized for several years with senile dementia, so I'd never known her, and her funeral felt like it came after a long delay. She was a tiny little French Canadian woman, every bit as tough as her husband was sentimental. My mother always talks about her drinking enormous bowls of tea with thick slices of deli meat and watching professional wrestling on the TV, which evidently she took seriously. Their home was cluttered--they were packrats of the highest order. When my mother's cousin E. bought grandpa's house from him (for some nominal amount), he and his brother cleaned it out by backing an 18 wheel flatbed up to the house and throwing stuff out the windows. In the shed was a case of the dye used to trace septic systems, warehoused since Grandpa had been a health inspector twenty or more years before.

My own grandfather, when he was beginning to show signs of Alzheimer's and remembered long ago better than he remembered recently, told this story about his in-laws. When my two great-uncles went into the army for the war, the family drove them to the train station. Grandpa Patrick had to stay in the car, in the parking lot, because he was so upset and sobbing. Christine, on the other hand, stood stoically on the platform with her boys, and the only comment she made, as the train pulled away, was "Goddamned Japs."

Shortly after telling this story, my grandfather asked which way we were headed and whether he could get a ride home with us. He was sitting in his own living room at the time.

When my mother was a small child, she gave her grandfather a coin purse with 13 pennies in it. Patrick accepted the gift, but promised he'd return the loan some day, with interest. On her wedding day, her grandfather gave her a sizable check, and the coin purse with the pennies in it, just as he'd promised. I think it special that a man remembered for twenty years that he had this coin purse in trust for his granddaughter. When he died, my mother slipped one of the pennies into the coffin with him. When my sister married (maybe both my sisters did this?), she slipped one of the pennies in her shoe, for luck.

Comments

[Amanda]

This is a wonderful tribute/entry...made me smile quite a bit. I could listen to Grandpa Patrick stories for hours...