Old memories are funny. They tie
themselves with long threads, to a sound or smell or image, and occasionally
they are pulled into awareness; swirling into view, tugged forward by one of our
senses. I seem to have more childhood memories than most people I know. I could
talk months before I could walk, and I’ve always supposed it was the early
language that allowed for so many early recollections. Since I was very young,
I’ve carried a few scenes around in my mind that seemed familiar and yet unrelated
to the rest of my life.
One of these memories is
attached to 1958 and the short time we lived in Lamar, Colorado. I was almost
four. In my memory, I can see a diner
with a large, wooden screen door; covered in bright, metal advertising. The
door is so large I can hardly reach the worn, metal handle. I am too small to ever
be able to pull it open on my own. The metal spring squeals as my dad opens the
door and it closes behind us with a sharp clap of wood on wood. Overhead, a
wooden fan, with long blades, cuts through the summer heat and blows my curls
around. Ahead, I see a circular stool as tall as I am. Its seat is upholstered
in green and white vinyl with shiny metal around the side. It’s attached to a
tall metal pole, bolted to the floor. It sits in a row of identical stools in front
of a long, wooden bar. My dad lifts me onto that stool and I sit carefully as the
seat swivels and twists left and right with my movement. The top of the bar is
tall, and I rest my arms on it as best I can. On the other side of the bar is a
smiling man with a big laugh, and a gently teasing manner. He talks to my parents, and he talks to me;
leaning across the wide bar to hear my answers to his questions. Behind me, I
hear the big screen door squeal and slam as people enter and exit throughout
our visit; each of them greeting the friendly man behind the counter. It’s a
very happy memory; surrounded in love, and yet, totally unrelated to
anything else I know in my life.
This memory drifted through my
mind for nearly sixty years before I ever described it to anyone. By the time I
thought to mention it, my dad was the only one left that could fill in the
blanks and attach its thread to the rest of my life.
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For as long as I can remember, I have always had three grandparents. My dad’s
parents, Ida and Arthur Johnson, and my mom’s mom, Frances Dibbens. I spent
lots of time with all three and have many wonderful memories of them during my
childhood. You would think I would have wondered why there were only three, but
I don’t recall questioning it.
My single memory of my second
grandpa was the day he died, in 1963. I don’t think I related the event to him
as a grandpa at the time. The phone on
the desk in the dining room is ringing. That isn’t anything new. My mom is
close to her family and has many friends, so our phone rings often. Mom appears
in the kitchen door, reaches over the desk in the dining room, and lifts the
receiver. The memory of that phone call is tied to a moment seconds after
she says, “hello.” In an instant, that call is set apart from all others and a
thread is tied that will forever connect the memory in my mind. First, there is silence and then, a quiet
sob. If you’ve ever uttered a sob or had your voice crack around children, you
know how quickly they home in on it. As Mom speaks softly into the receiver, quiet
sobs periodically interrupting her words, my two little sisters and I are drawn to her like magnets. She sits at
the desk with the receiver to her ear, and tears filling her eyes.
I
don’t think any of us had ever heard her cry. Her tears continue as she says
goodbye and sets the receiver back on the cradle. As the
oldest child, and the worrier of the family, I have questions. “Why are you
crying, Mommy? Is everything ok?”
Mom looks at my youngest sister, Laurie, whom she has
pulled onto her lap sometime during the call, and then Kris and me. She wipes
her eyes with a tissue, pulled from the box on the desk, and simply says, “My
Daddy died today.”
That memory is the only one I
had concerning my “other” grandpa. I don’t remember wondering why we didn’t
know her daddy. I don’t remember whether she went to the funeral. It would have
required a days’ worth of travel each way because of the distance.
By grade school, I understood
that my grandmother was divorced. She was a single unit in my eyes and I never
thought to connect her with “Mom’s daddy who died.” She lived in a house across
the highway from her restaurant, “Dibben’s Drive Inn,” on the outskirts of
Garden City, Kansas. She was independent, resourceful, and a manager of fry
cooks and curb hops. She drove around town in a green and white, air-conditioned
Buick, turning the big knob on the steering wheel as we eased around the
corners on the way to the bank or grocery store. Everyone seemed to know her,
and she had a cheerful word for each person she met; punctuated by laughter. To
the east of her two-story house sat a small mobile home; the home of her
brother-in-law, Jarman and his wife, Pearl. Uncle Jerry and Aunt Pearl were a
big part of the visits to my grandmother’s house. The laughter and teasing
never stopped when they were around. From of descriptions of my grandpa that my
mom’s cousins have now given me, I’m pretty sure that my grandpa and his
brother, Jerry, were very much alike.
As a teen, I remember digging through a storeroom shelf in
our basement one day and finding a white cardboard box. It was filled with
sympathy cards, dried flowers, and purple ribbons that appeared to be pulled
from a floral spray. I asked Mom about it at that time and she told me, in the
fewest words necessary, that they were from her dad’s funeral. She then placed the
box on a higher shelf and said no more.
Was it evidence that Mom
attended the funeral or that someone saved these “remembrance items” for her?
Grandma moved to Boulder,
Colorado when I was nine. It was further from me but closer to my uncle and five
cousins, who needed her help. Eventually, she took a job as a house mother for
a large boys’ dorm on the campus of the University of Colorado. I saw her as
often as I could but not as much as when she lived in Kansas.
In my late twenties, I was a young
divorced mother, myself. I was suffering the after effects of shame, and a fear of the
future. My mom, my daughter, Emily, and I headed to Boulder to visit Grandma
that summer. Soon after we arrived, Grandma pulled me into her little apartment’s
bedroom, away from my three-year-old daughter and worried mother. She closed
the door and we sat together on her bed. She told me, in no uncertain terms,
that I was strong and would survive. By that time, my grandpa had been gone
nearly 20 years. It didn’t seem appropriate to ask more questions. I was still
wallowing in humiliation and guilt; fully focused on my situation. What I
remember feeling was her strength and determination as her arms wrapped around
me and she said those words, “You are complete the way you are. You don’t need someone
else to make you happy.” I never doubted those words pouring from the experience
of the strong, joyful woman I called Grandma.
That happened several years
before I caught the genealogy bug and decades before I stood at Grandma’s grave. The boxes and bags of her letters, pictures, papers, and artifacts found their
way into my house, now operating as the “family history library.” It was then
that I discovered the brittle pieces of a faded wedding certificate; ripped in
half, but both pieces still safely stored away with the rest of the articles of
her life.
As I processed this puzzle as
an adult, the memory of the phone call swirled through my mind and I experienced it, this time, as one of a granddaughter
hearing of her grandfather’s death.
The holes in the puzzle
saddened me as I worked to fit the pieces of a broken family together;
a
romance,
a marriage,
a happy start with two children,
fond memories voiced by nieces and nephews of their Aunt Frances and Uncle
Forest,
stories of Grandpa’s big keg parties held at their farm in south central Kansas,
arguments bad enough for family intervention,
love and laughter,
family pictures,
a 200 mile move to Garden City,
a family business,
thirty years of marriage,
a betrayal,
broken trust,
a separation,
a divorce the year I was born,
a marriage certificate ripped in two,
carefully kept secrets,
and a collapse in communication between Grandpa, his extended family, and his
children.
Mom’s wounds were covered in perpetual
bandages of silence.
Mom has been gone since 2004. She
is the one who got me interested in genealogy and we often spoke about our
family tree. I don’t remember anyone asking me not to talk about my grandpa. It
seems so odd now that I wouldn’t have asked her something. Was there an
unspoken rule? Did it just feel so normal that I ignored the silence? Was she just
waiting for me to ask, ready with a prepared speech that she never got to give?
I’ll never know. She was so close to her family; both her mom’s and dad’s
family. I asked her questions about everyone in the family, except one person; her
dad, my Grandpa Dibbens.
The memory of the man across
the counter in Lamar spun through my mind for nearly sixty years before I ever
thought to describe it to anyone. By that time, my dad was the only one left
that could fill in the blanks and link the memory to my life. When I told him what
I recalled, he nodded and said, “That was your Grandpa Dibbens. He had a diner
in Lamar at the time I was transferred with the company, and we moved there for
a few months.”
As I sat processing this
information, I realized how full of God’s blessing and healing His plan had
been. How fortunate was my dad’s transfer! Mom had to have been hurting from
the abandonment by her father. No one knew that Grandpa would be dead within
five years. Dad was transferred to the same state and town in which Mom’s
estranged father was living. We were there for several months and Mom had a
chance to reconcile with her dad; healing some of the damage caused by the
trauma in her childhood. She had the chance to forgive, and he had the chance
to be forgiven.
And for this granddaughter? I
have the gift of a lovely memory of a grandpa I thought I’d never known.
I don’t know why Mom stayed
silent about her childhood and her dad. He remained in all the family pictures
but not in the family stories. Possibly, it still hurt to talk about it or more
probably she had determined early on to move past it and make our childhood
different from hers. From all I’ve learned and all I know, she succeeded at
that! She was her mother’s daughter, after all! My sisters and I grew up
sheltered from all the vices that marred her own childhood, and all the love
and goodness she could gather.
