My mother's elderly grandparents lived with us when I was growing up. They were always a presence in our home. We called them Nana and Grandpop. They had the front bedroom on the second floor.
Nana and Grandpop's names were Ada and Tom Morris and they were the parents of my mother's father Tom Morris.
Nana liked to talk about growing up and the first time she ever saw a car going down the street.
Nana was always trying to help around the house but Grandpop seemed to only sit on the couch reading the paper and smoking. He had those two yellow fingers on the hand he held his cigarette. Pall Mall non-filter in the red pack. Yes, we grew up playing on the living room floor under a cloud of smoke. Mom smoked Kent cigarettes but only occasionally. I never knew Dad to ever have a cigarette nor did Nana.
One of my early chores was to walk with him down to Sherb's, the little corner store down the street at Greene and Rockland, to buy his pack of Pall Malls. I got to get some penny candy for my efforts. It got him out of the house for a bit to shuffle down the street but eventually he couldn't do it anymore and I would walk down myself to get the smokes. I was one of the few kids in the neighborhood allowed to buy cigarettes from Mrs. Sherb who knew me from the years coming into the store with Grandpop.
Grandpop spent most of his time on the couch and really only got up one time famously to let some drunk guy in our house which I wrote about here.
They both died within a couple of years of each other in 1962 and 1964. After they were gone Tom and I moved into their room in the front of the house on the second floor. Then we had Dan's crib in the room too. Good thing it was a big room.
Betsy moved into our room and finally had a room of her own. Life changed in our house without our great-grandparents living there with us.
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