today's my grandfather's birthday. he's 95 or 96. i can't remember. the guy in the picture is not my grandfather. i don't have a picture of him. he doesn't play the violin. or maybe he does and he just never told me.anyway, my grandpa is awesome. when i was a kid i thought he was hilarious because he always made fun of my grandma. but not in a mean way. also, he would drink a martini everyday and he'd give us the olive. we would fight over it. i love olives. and i didn't know it but, i guess, as a young child, i also liked gin and vermouth because that's what the olive tasted like.
my grandpa grew up on a farm in southern indiana. he had a ton of brothers and a few sisters, but only he and seven of his brothers made it past childhood. they all went by their middle names, which i guess was like an irish thing that people used to do. my grandpa's parents were from ireland. anyway, they all have cool names like omer, mac, elmo, fred, frank, and gus, just to name a few. anyway, when my grandpa was in high school, he took this civil servant exam just because he figured why the hell not. then after high school, he moved to indianapolis and got a job washing dishes while he went to night school. then one day, two of his brothers showed up in indy because they got this letter back home that said he did well on that civil servant exam and he was offered a job in washington dc as a messenger. so he hopped on a bus out to dc and took the job. he rented a room in this building and one of the girls in that building turned out to be my grandma. anyway, he worked as a messenger for awhile, getting paid a thousand dollars a year, which i guess wasn't too bad back then because it was during the great depression. he started taking night classes at this small college that was put together by a few georgetown professors. when he graduated from there, he got a job with the IRS. he was there for awhile and had a few kids. my dad was one of them. then after awhile, he moved the family to fort wayne, indiana. they bought a house on standish drive next door to this big family. one of the girls in that family was my mom.
the men in my family are very lazy about going out and looking for girls to marry. but so far they've been lucky with living extremely close to pretty good ones. not me. my neighbors are weirdos.
4 comments:
I like this story. Isn't it weird to think that your grandkids could be writing about you and your life one day?
Sorry to hear about your weirdo neighbors. You'll have to expand your search and be the first to do so in a long line of lazy love seekers.
Or just marry the weirdo and give your grandkids something effed up and interesting to write about.
-SZ
I thoroughly enjoyed this tale.
Hilarious. Would you say the trend continued for Matt and now Joe. I mean Matt met his wife by going to high school, and Joe met his wife by going to Grad School, maybe joe put a little work in because he chose grad school, matt on the other hand kind of had to go to high school.
DEFINITELY the trend has continued into our generation with matt and joe. we'll see what happens with me and john. should be interesting, considering how lazy we are.
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