The Nerdy Hippie

Men About Horses

Part One: The Distance Gene Inherited

My paternal grandpa didn’t much care for one of his granddaughters because she was “big as a dining room table” but he would’ve moved to Missouri with the neighbor down the road for once delivering him a basket of oatmeal-raisin cookies. Outsiders who met my grandpa considered him a nice old man with wild stories of being a ranch hand in Wyoming. I helped him put down some of his stories a few years before he died. There were historic facts like the early death of his brother who was struck by lightning while riding a horse to the post office and then there were events I recognized from old John Wayne westerns. The movie memories unnerved me in their vividness compared to the real life he’d lived for very nearly one hundred years. There was grandpa telling me all about bad guys and bunkhouses and shotguns with no mentions of being a husband or a father or how he imagined the grown up face of the toddler daughter who died.

The last time I saw my grandpa he was barely there mentally with no recollection of who I was but it cut little as he never tried to know me before anyway. We lived in a trailer court together in Wyoming when I was a kid. Grandpa talked a lot about his own toughness while grandma taught me how to read by flash cards and helped me plant hollyhock seeds and took me to yard sales in her giant brown Oldsmobile with signal lights that dinged as loud as the car was big. Grandma gave me dollars for helping her clean out her trailers between renters and let me read the Agatha Christie mysteries she bought at garage sales two for a nickel. Grandpa beat on his white husky and tied her up against her wishes until the sad dog broke away too late for the puppies that’d starved out back in a weedy old shed. He said he didn’t want no puppies anyway. He said he didn’t want no dog when Samantha the husky disappeared soon after.

The older my dad gets the more like my grandpa he becomes. Or, more accurately, the more I realize how much they were always alike. It's scary clear to me in this old picture of my mom and dad on a rare family hike.

Grandma Vera, July, 1953

I tracked down a new family snapshot. It was taken in July of 1953 in Gillette, Wyoming. Left to right, my grandpa, Grandma Vera, my uncle Glenn Jr., my uncle Larry, my uncle Gary, my dad Kerry. It's so Dorothea Lange I'm giddy!

I most love how this snapshot reinforces my childhood impressions of my Grandma Vera. She stands strong in a blowing wind. 

Family History Project: Grandma Vera

This is a photo of my grandma in Gillette, Wyoming in the 1930s when she taught in a remote one-room schoolhouse. It was Grandma Vera who taught me to read by flash cards in her junk shop. In her big, brown Oldsmobile we rode to garage sales where she once bargained a man down to half off a nickel paperback. She read mysteries last page first and gave me leftover Agatha Christies. 

I'm just beginning to try to learn and document my family history. I used to measure the oldness of a relative by their desire to visit cemeteries. Now I want to trace family trees and visit grave sites. Hmm...could it be at all connected to the big countdown clock at the top right of this blog? 

If so, I've discovered yet another fabulous benefit to turning forty because it's enriching my life to learn more about my ancestors and to sift through the artifacts. Take for example my first Bible. Grandma Vera gave me a children’s version she annotated wherever Jesus spoke of lost lambs. Looking at the illustrations, it's clear that Jesus is a hippie!

Scanned illustration from my first Bible:

Grandma Vera quizzed me about the lessons I learned from the Bible she gave me. My parents were not then active Christians and we never went to church, so Grandma Vera was my spiritual teacher. She emphasized Jesus's loving goodness whenever we worked side by side cleaning the rentals in her trailer court. My grandma endured a childhood absent of loving kindness. Her father was a mean drunk and at a very young age she overheard her own mother tell the neighbor that she wished Vera had died instead of her young son because boys can get so much more done on a ranch. Grandma Vera introduced me to Jesus through the prism of her own bruised but forgiving heart. 

The greatest benefit of connecting with the past and with the experience of an ancestor is the potential to inhabit the best of their identity and, hopefully, grow from their experience. We get busy and we forget. I didn't remember just how much I worked to please my Grandma Vera by paying attention to her spiritual lessons. I forgot how studious I was with that Bible and my earnest marginalia to learn from Jesus's words how to live a fulfilled and giving life. Grandma Vera raised sheep, bottle feeding sick young lambs, but I didn't fully understand until examining her life that she was a true shepherdess.

I don't for an instant juxtapose the below images as a comparative illustration between Jesus and myself. I'm not quite that vain! On the left, a scanned image of the cover of my first Bible. The photo on the right is from the time my grandmother gave me Bible lessons. I juxtapose them as an illustration of how my grandmother helped me to be a more faithful young girl with a desire to learn from Jesus's example. 

Why does any of this matter? It's given me an important key in finding my way back to an element of my faith that's been lacking--that childlike eagerness to learn and give and love. My grandmother died 24 years ago. Through my family history project, she continues to influence me for the good.