Grandfathers

I've been looking back through childhood pictures and came across these two next to one another. They are my grandfathers and I think the two very different pictures say something about just how different the two sides of my family are.



Louie Glenn, my mother's father, was a farmer (I've written about him before). He almost always wore blue and white striped "farmer" overalls and smelled like a combination of vegetables, fertilizer, and tractor oil. He played a lot of games with us children, he usually had pink snowballs in the bread box, and the candy he gave us most often was the neapolitans (I still love those!). After he passed away I inherited some of his furniture. I was in middle school and I put his banquet cabinet (from the dining room) in my room and didn't keep a thing in there. When I missed him I would crawl inside and shut the doors and breathe in the smell of vegetables, fertilizer and tractor oil. Every now and then I pass an aging gentleman with that smell and I instantly like him, even though we've never met.



Erskine B. was my father's father. He usually had on a suit when I saw him which is not very surprising since he used to be a lawyer. He had bowls in several places in his house filled up with not often used coins, like silver dollars and half dollars, and I used to spend hours with those bowls. He loved to duck hunt and I even remember waking up while spending Christmas there to find out that he had left at 4 that morning to go hunting but he said to tell us "Merry Christmas". Another Christmas I remember him catering dinner which I thought very funny because there were only 12 of us. Have you ever seen the movie Must Love Dogs? Her dad reminds me so much of my grandfather, right down to the poetry recitations.

Anyway, I'm not sure that I have a point exactly, but it just made me laugh to look at these pictures together. So very different and yet somehow they both had kids with close enough interests to meet while racing cars... Strange.