I wish I had a picture of Grandpop somewhere. He was my mother's grandfather and he and Nana, her grandmother, lived in our house for about eight years when we were growing up. I was recently chatting online with my siblings and Grandpop came up. During the years he lived in our house I don't remember ever having a real conversation with him. He had been involved in a car accident many years before down at Wayne Junction and had suffered some brain damage. He was never the same after that accident and of course I never knew him from before that happened.
The story that came this week was the incident with Grandpop and the Crazy Man. I'm not really sure what was going on that evening. The man was probably just very drunk but he was walking down our street, making a lot of noise, and knocking on people's doors trying to come in. He was probably looking for his home or a friends but was definitely on the wrong street. Some of the neighbors were calling each other with warnings about this guy. The man was also not fully dressed and was running around in his underwear. Mom got a phone call from someone. I remember looking out the window as the guy came down the street and then he walked up to our house and started banging on the outside door. Now we had some doors. One to the enclosed glass porch and then there was a door to a small foyer and then a final third door that opened into our living room. Dad was still at work or on his way home.
So as we watched from the inner windows that looked onto the the enclosed glass porch Grandpop was sitting in the couch in his usual spot and then for some unknown reason he got up which he hardly ever did and then proceeded to walk through the foyer doors to the front door. Before anyone could stop him he opened the front door and the crazy man came into our house.
Mom started yelling and then she grabbed a large metal candle holder and started waving it around. Grandpop was shuffling back over to his seat on the couch. Later Nana told us he thought it was Dad at the door. LOL. Mom would not let the man out of the foyer and blocked his way into the house with the candle holder. The man must have realized his mistake when confronted by this woman defending her family and home and he turned around, left the house and went on down the street. I don't know what happened to him after that. Mom was upset for quite awhile. It also wasn't too much longer after that when Nana and Grandpop went to nursing homes because of their declining health and Mom's inability to care for them and six children.
For days after that incident Nana kept berating Grandpop for letting that man into our home. All he could say was he thought it was George meaning my father.
Tom and Ada Morris, our great-grandparets, had two children. They had a girl, whom I forget her name at the moment, who died as a child from a common childhood disease. They had a boy also named Tom who would marry my grandmother Elizabeth Keegan. Tragically he would die at the age of 24 from pneumonia when my mother was a baby. Tom and Ada doted on their only grandchild. They lived in the neighborhood over on Zeralda Street. I vaguely remember their house before they moved in with us.
When their health began to decline and they couldn't take care of their home anymore Mom took them in. They had the large front bedroom. Grandpop was a heavy smoker and there was always a cloud of smoke in the living room. He smoked Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes.
When he was still somewhat mobile I would walk with him down the street to the corner store at Greene and Logan that was tricky with him because it was busy. Then it closed and we had to go down the next block to Rockland Street to the corner store Sherb's where he would buy his Pall Malls. Eventually he couldn't make the walk anymore and my job was to go down the street and buy the Pall Malls for him. I was one of the only kids in the neighborhood allowed to buy cigarettes there because Mrs. Sherb knew they were for my great-grandfather.
I wish I knew more about him and his life. This is one of the reasons I've been writing my thoughts in this online blog journal. I want my grandchildren to know something about me from my own words. I wrote earlier about my grandfathers and not knowing much about them. Someday Henry may sit down with his grandchildren and read them something I wrote here.
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