Snow fort, Author Andrew Wiseman (CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported)
“For He says to the snow, ‘Fall on the earth’; Likewise to the gentle rain and the heavy rain of His strength” (Job 37: 6).
Winter followed summer, and one year another. With time I acquired logic and organizational skills from my grandmother. From my grandfather, I learned to dance.
My grandfather reveled in music. Where my grandmother’s taste ran to hymns, he enjoyed livelier music — polkas, waltzes, mazurkas, csárdáses. I first learned to dance to these standing on the sofa, supported in Grandpa’s arms.
As I grew older, he chided me sternly to dance in a ladylike manner — “Small steps, small steps!” — something I never quite mastered. Absorbing my grandfather’s passion for life more readily than his instructions on decorum, I was routinely swept away by the music.
Grandpa taught me the difference between pints and quarts, patiently pouring paint from one can to another for me.
Grandpa was, also, the one to part my hair on the left. I would stand between his knees, as he carefully plied the comb. “No, not on the right, Annalein. Never on the right. Hitler parted his hair on the right.”
It was my father who cut my hair. Since it was usually kept short, I worried that strangers might mistake me for a boy.
Evenings the family would sit contentedly listening to my grandfather’s large collection of records or watching televised wrestling with him.
Sunday afternoons, we would all listen to Strauss on the radio with its rotating display of vinyl fish. My sister and I would lie on the living room rug on these afternoons, drawing or coloring as the sun spilled through the windows.
My recollection of Grandpa is of a smiling, mustachioed man in a white cotton undershirt — a glass of beer and a box of crackers at his side. Continue reading
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