Pee-Paw & Num-Nums.

This entry is dedicated to my Mam-Ma and Pap-Pa, commonly referred to by my friend Eric as "Pee-Paw & Num-Nums." They are my mother's parents, and they are adorable. Here is my Pap-Pa in a picture from a recent trip to Florida. Notice that his ears and nose continue to grow with age:


Here is Mam-Ma, holding a baby. She's always holding a baby or giving you a wet kiss (or both at the same time, accompanied by a cooing noise):



Near the end of this summer I finally took the time to start interviewing them about their lives. I sat down with them in their aged Indianapolis home, which smells of Vanilla Wafers and afghan blankets (it's actually a lovely smell), and told them to start talking.

Since then, I've been working on typing up the interviews. We'll be continuing the project tomorrow when I take a road trip with both of them to good ol' Salem, Indiana. Rather than just talk about the memories, I hope to take photographs of the run-down one room schoolhouse my Pap-Pa went to as a child, and possibly visit the creek where my Mam-Ma first went skinny-dipping. Maybe we'll even find where the old roller-skating rink was (it's where they met).

They really do have a lot to tell. Both of them were born WAM! right in midst of that giant economic gut-punch we call the Great Depression. Growing up with very little in their pockets, they compensated for the lack of wealth with the joy they found in simple pleasures, their dedication to hard work, and their active imaginations. Such a generation will not be around much longer, and I want to capture it as best I can while I still have the chance.

Look for more entries dedicated to Pee-Paw & Num-Nums. I'll leave you with excerpts from both of their interviews.

Pap-Pa's Interview (talking about part of his life on the farm):

"So I was about 5 years old, and noontime came, and they’d have their lunch with ‘em, and my dad would put me on the tractor and I’d drive the tractor around the field when they wanted to, and when they were done eating lunch and everything, he’d come back and take over. And I remember one time, my dad—in the back of the farm there were some trees and roots and things he wanted to clear out. He was down there, and my brothers were diggin' around, getting these trees kind of loosed… and I kept aggravating my dad to let me pull the tractor down there. Now this tractor didn’t have rubber tires on it, it had lugs on it, and I threw my coat over the lugs, and to start it I had to set the crank and I had to get up on top of it and jump down to get it turned. And it started, and I ran over my jacket, and I backed down to where they was at. And let’s see, that was when I was about five or six-years-old, or something.

"But, my Dad always let me do things. I can’t hardly figure out why. Only thing I can figure is that he might have had me do so much in my life, is that I had a brother older than I was, that fell off a wagon, and dad ran over him and broke both of his legs. And, at my grandparents house they had two poles coming from the ceiling to hold his legs up. And they healed—it was a funny way they’d done it. But anyway, then after Lloyd, they had a boy named Bruce that died eight days after he was born, because of a blood disease, a blood problem. And then I came along… and I guess he kind of felt that he’d kind of take care of me a little more."

Now, an excerpt from Mam-Ma's interview (discussing her fun summer days with her cousin):

"I grew up with a very happy childhood. I kind of had the best of both worlds because my cousin Shirley and I were just about the same age, and her grandparents lived on a farm just about five miles south of Salem. So I grew up in a small town, and yet I was at the farm an awful lot because of her, so I had a lot of fun farm experiences, too.

"She always had horses, so I got to ride horses, and she usually had a pony. It started out with a pony named Dixie, and it was the sweetest little thing. If you fell off, she would immediately stop and stand there ‘til you got back on. And let’s see. Shirley had one horse named Dandy, and she had a baby. I can remember us sitting up in the barn saying, 'Now what are we going to name her?' And at that time, Flicka was popular, so the colt’s name turned out to be Flicka.

"And we had a lot of fun out there. We used to play hide-and-go-seek. Some of the neighbor kids out near the farm would come over and we’d play hide-and-go-seek in the barn. And we had a lot of good times. There was a little creek down below and we would go down there and play in the water—pretend we were mermaids. We were close to a big river, too. So, we would go down there and they had an old swimming hole.

"I remember one time just Shirley and I were down there, and we were under the bridge, and we thought, 'Well, wouldn’t it be fun to just take off our bathing suits and swim in the nude?' So we did! We hung our bathing suits on a branch (laughs) and splashed around and had a good time. We were close enough to the road that we could hear a car coming—it was a gravel road."

Kelly: So you wouldn’t be surprised? (laughs)

"Yeah, right! (laughs) We used to go down there and wade with Shirley’s grandmother sometimes. I remember one time we were wading along, and all of a sudden she reached down in the water between her legs and came up with a big ol’ frog! We had an awful lot of fun down there. We were like sisters, really, when we were growing up."

Hope you liked this. More to come.