by Richard Seifried
Signal Hill Musings
July, 2006
Recently I wrote about my mother’s father, my Grandpa Carey. Now I want to share another wonderful person with you. I want to tell you a little bit about Grandma Carey.
Always, in my recollections, Grandma possessed beautiful, long, gray hair. She wore it in a bun, let it down at night, and stroked it with a brush about 100 times. She was a tall, thin pioneer woman who spent most of her life caring for her husband, five children, and visiting relatives.
That means that every day, including Sunday, she emptied the ceramic chamber pots (thunder buckets) and washed them. Her stove used chopped wood for fuel. Water came from an outside pump. In winter, she would have to pour scalding water on it to unfreeze the handle. The toilet was, by my little boy observations, way down at the end of the backyard, next to the barn and the alley, a two holer.
Her backyard was a combination of vegetable garden, flowers, weeds along the fence rows, great catalpa trees, and pens that held coon dogs, a rat terrier, and sometimes a raccoon. Too, there were chickens and ducks and a convenient chopping block with a hatchet available in the kitchen behind the stove.
All of that plus Tony, the cat, who would, in rainy weather, catch mice, bring them into the kitchen, and turn them loose. Honest! I saw him do it.
Grandma and I were pals.
Every Friday we’d either walk or ride the bus downtown and go to Shine’s Piqua Theater. Friday was cowboy day.
Hettie Mae, her name, loved cowboy movies. In the very early years of my life, we watched the all-time greats, such as Buck Jones (he had a square jaw that Grandma loved), Tom Mix (until he died in a Texas auto crash), Hoot Gibson (who always ate an apple), Tim Holt and all the other B movie heroes.
Then, one day, God presented Grandma with the cowboy she really loved, Hopalong Cassidy.
He was handsome, middle aged, gray haired, deep voiced, and a straight shooter. That is, he was morally a fantastic cowboy hero.
Hoppy never kissed his horse. In fact, he never kissed anybody (except his wife, off screen). And, wonder of wonders, he didn’t sing. A real plus.
Oh, I almost forgot. He wore a white hat.
His bewhiskered “sidekick” (Windy Halliday) was at first played by Fuzzy Knight then later by George “Gabby” Hayes. The old guy didn’t have any teeth and Grandma declared (when Grandpa wasn’t around) that Gabby reminded her of her husband, my Grandpa.
Much later in life, living with Clara, her daughter, Grandma would walk all over town, alone and at night. She’d carry a flashlight. We attempted to stay with her as she walked to the drug store or our home or wherever else she thought she had business. But, dang it, we’d get embarrassed because a lot of people walked at night during the 1930s, ‘40s, and even the ‘50s. Streetlights only illuminated intersections, at street corners. A couple, a lone person, or a family would be walking toward her and Grandma would shine her three-cell flashlight right in their faces.
Mom or one of my aunts (never me) would scold her and she’d say, “How do you expect me to know who they are?”
She almost reached 100 years old, her last thirteen bedridden. A thighbone had given away as she walked across the floor and never healed. With the fall went her mind. That great old, 100% hard shell Baptist lady took a long time dying.
Once, when she was rather lucid, her three daughters placed my old pal on a straight-backed chair and tied her there with a sheet so she couldn’t fall off. We all sat around her, including my family, and her youngest daughter, Aunt Lucille, started teasing her.
“Let’s see, mother. You were married in 19__.” The date was after Lucille was born.
Grandma, blind in one eye, one hand amputated because of gangrene, sort of looked straight ahead and said, no, that wasn’t correct.
But Aunt Lucille persisted. “It was too 19__!”
Grandma, disgusted, replied, “Well! If you are right, then you know what that makes you.”
Of course, all of us burst out in laughter.
Grandma and I were buddies.
Sometimes, not in sadness, I feel their presence: Bill and Hettie Mae Carey, my grandparents.
