Monday, June 27, 2016
Monday
My Father is the second oldest in a family of five. All boys. He and his older brother Rick are maybe a year or two apart. Which would make Rick 70 or 71. They were born just after WWII and before my grandfather went to work for the postal service as a letter carrier. I say that because that job afforded the family some financial stability and provided for the family as it grew. Until then, my grandparents leaned heavily on my great grandparents. At some point before the others came, my father, Phil, and Rick lived his grandparents. I'm not sure what caused the separation, or were my grandparents were during that time, but it left a mark on my father. He remembers his grandfather fondly, but can't seem to connect to his own parents in the same way.
To hear my father tell it, Joe was an insurance salesman and self made man. When his daughter started her family, he gave her his home and built another one with his own hands in the field behind the house. He was a kind man who enjoyed company but would cut the lights off when he'd visited enough. And then you'd just have to find your own way out.
We stayed with our grandparents once too. Mom and Dad were trying so hard to get the bakery off the ground. I can't remember if they were baking commercially out of the house we were renting, which is how they started, or maybe by then they were working nights in the kitchen of a local Decatur bakery, renting cooler space and the use of their equipment in the off hours. I remember they would drag us to that kitchen at night and we'd sleep in the car next to the loading dock. "Look at the rats" someone would say, but I'd always miss them.
It makes sense that they needed help. They were working long hours and there were three of us. How do you juggle these things? The work supports the children, but the work consumes all your time and attention. Saps your strength. Tempers are short. Relationships suffer. The work suffers and it all starts to fall apart. So it makes sense to lean on family. And so they decided the course of action was to focus completely on their business and we drove from Atlanta to Raleigh. I don't know how long we stayed. Long enough that we enrolled in school for a short time. I might have been the fall. I think I was in kindergarten. We stayed long enough for resentment to creep in. For rebellion.
# posted by joel @ 2:28 PM 
