I woke to a pleasing memory of my grandparents. A memory, not forgotten, but possibly fading. It was as if some internal stimulus was telling me that this memory should not be forgotten, should not even fade, even after seven decades. Grandparents, those wonderful creators of your own parents should be remembered as kindly as I remember my Grandpa Frank and Grandma Mary.
I gently swung my leg off the bed, gathered my pants, put them on and quietly walked downstairs with bare feet, all without waking my wife. I sat in my recliner chair turned on a light and started writing about that gold nugget memory of one special weekend out of many weekends that I’ve spent with my beloved grandparents.
That memory, in detail, slowly surfaced through the cloudiness of my sleep. It then became a vivid image as it surfaced in full bloom. I found myself smiling and feeling calm, at ease with myself as my pencil danced on the notebook as if it already knew what to write and didn’t need assistance.
The memory of my grandparents made me realize how lucky I was to have lived seven decades, and more, with all the valuable memories that I have experienced and stored in my brain: my wife, my daughter, my grandkids, grandparents, some other relatives, my profession, my hobbies, and other miscellaneous but important events that I experienced as I traveled on my long road-trip through life.
I thought of that special weekend in 1955. I was a precocious ten years old, anxious to get into our car. I kept goading Mom and Dad to hurry. Their looks of displeasure were as rain dripping off my mental umbrella. “Come on! Hurry!” I persisted.
My mom and dad were going to Canada for the weekend, so I was staying at grandpa’s and grandma’s house. I was joyful about it because I had been begging all week to spend this special weekend at my grandparents’ house as I had done last two years. I didn’t care about going to Toronto (though it was not intended for me to go), or the boredom of shopping and seeing people pretending to be someone else on a stage for a theatrical performance. Yucky stuff. Something about a damn silly cat on a hot tin roof. Stupid cat. I was happy to stay with my grandparents, and so were mom and dad. They had wanted to have a get-away weekend for a long time. It was perfect, they got what they wanted and so did I.
This special weekend occurred only on one weekend a year. It was the grape picking, grape squashing, juice making wine weekend. Glory be, I was happy.
My grandparents were my favorite relatives. It seems like a strange thing for a kid to say because they were old, not mobile in the sense of traveling, stayed at home most of the time and spoke broken English. They were Italian immigrants from Sicily. However, I liked being with them, especially Grandpa Frank.
Grandpa Frank was a tall, robust man at six feet four inches tall. To me he looked huge. Add some leaves and he’d be a tree. If I talked to him when we were both standing, I’d get a sore neck from looking up at him. And I did “look-up to him.” He was bald, with a fringe of hair from ear to ear. His face was round, the type of face that enabled him to make funny expressions and play the clown while adding some of his stories and jokes. As it is now-a-days, he had facial hair, a thick mustache. It prickled when he would pick me up and hug me. Sometimes I would squirm, and giggle and he’d rub his mustache into my neck and cheek even more. I saw him do it to Grandma Mary. She did not like the feel of it and would push him away. She would say, “No kiss. Go shave.” Grandpa and I would both laugh at her finger pointing gesture toward the bathroom hoping he would shave. She would look quite serious, but a couple time as she turned away from us, I caught a smile forming on her lips. I’ll bet she got brush- burned in private, though. Grandpa liked the Red Shelton TV show and had been watching it since 1951. By 1965 he and I were watching it. Like Red, he laughed at his own jokes and did some of Red’s funny gestures and characters for me. I tried never to miss the show at home and think that we were both watching it as if we were sitting next to each other. I started telling some Skelton jokes in school and found myself laughing before I finished them or laughing when I was finished.
During some Red Shelton TV shows that we were able to watch together, Grandpa would often put his arm around my shoulder and pull me into his embrace. I’d look at him and there would be his contagious smile. His eyes simply radiated love. I hoped my eyes did the same for him, though, in that era men did not tell men or boys that they loved them. I didn’t care much for him ruffling my hair, but it was not important, and I got used to it quickly. I’d say to myself, “So what if I have messed up hair. I’ll be a lot more messed up in the morning when I rise from bed. Will it bother me then? No.” I never minded the ruffled hair routine, although when grandpa was sitting I’d rub my hand across the top of his head and say, “I’m paying you back for messing up my hair.” The laughter was almost instantaneous, grandma’s too.
As big, tall, and hardy looking like Grandpa was, to me he was a gentle and humorous old man whom I loved.
Grandma Mary was short, shorter than most women. She was about a foot shorter than Grandpa Frank. She was a stout woman with short white hair who kept hugging me to her plump breasts. At ten years of age there was something dormant inside of me that let me know that breasts were more than for feeding babies, but, at the time, they were just comfortable pillows.
I loved her, too. She taught me to like Cheerios in Lipton tea instead of milk. The tea was sweetened. It was like eating dessert for breakfast or for a snack. Grandma Mary and Grandpa Frank watched me eat them voraciously and were startled, at first, when I’d eat half the box of Cheerios at one sitting. I can still remember their combined laughs, the mixture of rich baritone mingling with soprano. One time I looked up from my Cheerios tea to see Grandpa Frank with his right arm around Grandma Mary’s right shoulder while Grandma Mary’s left arm was around Grandpa’s waist. Her arm was lost behind Grandpa’s back because Grandma’s arm was too short to reach around Grandpa’s waist. They were looking at each other merrily, then pointing at me and smiling. They loved me. It was a special feeling that has lasted a lifetime.
Grandma Mary made a to-die-for spaghetti sauce that included meatball that simmered in the sauce for hours. Grandma would use grated Romano cheese to cover the top of the pile of spaghetti with juicy, but not runny, sauce on top, like snow at the top of a mountain. If I were sentenced to death and asked what meal I would want as my last meal, it would be Grandma Mary’s spaghetti and meatball dinner, plus wine made from Concord grapes. I’d die happy.
My special weekend with Grandpa and Grandma had finally arrived and we were there, in front of their house.
I stood on the sidewalk, where my mom and dad dropped me off in front of my Grandparents’ house. I stood silently looking down Grandpa’s blacktop driveway. The driveway was a splendid tunnel of Concord grapes, vines and those broad grape leaves that kept out most of the sunshine on the underside of the tunnel which was in shadow all summer and early fall grape harvest which usually took place sometime from mid-September to mid-October. Grandpa somehow knew when the harvest was ready based on sugar content, which I did not understand because the bunches of grapes I ate all summer were always ready for my mouth, tongue, and tastebuds.
As I looked up the driveway. It looked longer than it really was. The fifty to sixty feet looked more like seventy to eighty feet. Perhaps the Ponzo illusion was the cause. You know, where a set of train tracks seems to come together as you look down the tracks and this gives the illusion of more distance than it really is.
The ten feet wide blacktop driveway was only about three years old and still looked like new because my Grandparents, being older, rarely went any place in their car, but when they did it was for short distances. The driveway was India ink black and looked even darker due to the shade and shadows created by the grape arbor.
This tunnel of Concord grapes started next to the muted yellow siding of the house and rose upward ten feet, then went horizontally, like a roof would. It then descended on the far edge of the driveway.
The plump, purplish grapes sagged down from the tunnel roof and what little sunshine managed to make it through would reflect off vines, leaves and bunches of grapes. It gave me the impression of being a Christmas tunnel, but with only yellowish, purplish, and greenish lights. It was an amazing sight for me, though I imagine was simply a normal sight to all the neighbors who lived in this northside of the city, called the Italian neighborhood.
Grandpa and I had painted the garage door in the spring, so the paint was still fresh, not marred much with dust and dirt. It was still somewhat glossy and from the sidewalk it shone because the tunnel stopped short of the garage roof and the sun could blanket the door during mid-morning hours and early afternoon hours as the sun rose and set.
The most remarkable view, however, was that on a clear, sunny day the sunshine reflected off the garage door made it appear as if the entire door was lighted-up with blazing, but invisible fluorescent lights; it was a huge light at the end of the tunnel.
As an adolescent, I had heard the expression, “A light at the end of the tunnel,” but at that age I wasn’t aware that it also had a religious context for a near-death-experience. When I asked, I was simply told that when you can see something bad or troublesome coming to an end, that’s the light at the end of the tunnel.
My grandparents’ house was two spacious levels. They lived in the bottom one. The top one was rented as a large apartment. Both levels had porches with windows facing the grape tunnel. However, the bottom level’s window opened close to the roof of the grape tunnel. On lazy, or boring days I would sit on the sill and gorge myself with grapes. I didn’t even spit out the seeds. I was a hog at times and as a result I needed to run to the toilet. Also, I always got grape stains on my shirts, fingers, hands, lips, etc. How could I not have stains, I would explain to mom and dad. The grapes are juicy and squirt juice I told them, but that did not bring any smiles. I ruined some shirts that way, but it was so worth doing, I thought. Grandma and Grandpa would laugh when they saw me.
But I came up with a solution was that I would wear grape stained shirts when I visited my grandparents (my mom’s parents). This solution pleased my mom and dad, so there were no problems after that, unless I stained my pants.
My special weekend was when Grandpa and Grandma worked all day to pick the grapes into old fashioned wooden bushel baskets. At first, we all picked and filled the bushels. They were brought to the cellar and dumped into a smooth sided concrete bowl that stood about two, maybe two and a half feet high with a clean tile floor that had a drain the emptied into buckets on the outside of the bowl shape. The grapes were dumped into this bowl until it was three-fourths full, then Grandpa Frank took the empty baskets and returned to pick more grapes while grandma and I stayed with the grape bowl.
Now, the part I really loved would happen. Grandma would raise her old, grape stained dress up to her lover thigh and I rolled up my special grape-stained, old pants as far as I could up toward my crotch. Grandma then washed and scrubbed her feet as well as mine. We put on old, grape stained sneakers (athletic shoes) that used to be white. They were washed and had rubber soles. The reason for this is that the bunches of grapes were still attached to the stems that could hurt or cut the bottom of our feel. I told grandma that a little blood in the wine may add to the taste. She took a playful swat at my head, said something in Italian, probably not printable, but I was far too fast for her. Then we climbed into the bowl and started squashing and smashing the grapes into pulp as the juice ran out and filled the buckets.
Grandpa would take the full buckets of juice and empty them into the top of the one empty barrel in the underground cellar. Both barrels had opening is their tops for pouring juice into. One barrel was for making new wine and the other still had wine in it that was already made the previous year. Both barrels had spigots at the bottom for draining wine.
Grandpa didn’t explain how the juice was changed to wine. I do know that there were empty bags of yeast and sugar scattered on the floor. I wasn’t interested in that anyway, though I should have been so I could make my own wine as an adult. Wine reminds me of grandpa Frank and Grandma Mary, so I now enjoy it not only for the taste, but also for the memories.
When grandma and I stamped all the juice that we could from the bowl we cleaned out the pulp and stems. Grandpa would help empty the detritus, then get rid of it. When he came back he would bring a bushel, and get another bushel, and another until the bowl was again three-fourths full and grandma and I would again repeat our performances until all the filled baskets of grapes were used. Grandpa’s juice barrel would almost always be three-fourths full when we were done, give or take a half-dozen pails of juice.
It was an all-day job, and I was tired and worn out at the end of it. I wondered how grandpa and grandma could do it at their age. They were huffing and puffing which worried me, but fifteen minutes later they’d be fine or, at least, they seemed to be fine.
The next day, Sunday, we would walk to St. Anthony’s church which was only a half a block away. When we got back and changed our clothes grandpa and grandma, who were still tired, would relax the rest of the day. When I got bored, I grabbed a coffee cup from the sink and went to the garage cellar. I filled the cup with wine and went upstairs to the garage and drank it. I didn’t care much for the taste, but damned if I wasn’t going to have another.
A few hours later I woke up in bed, fully dressed. I went to the TV room where grandpa told me that he found me drunk and sleeping on the floor in the garage. He and grandma laughed. Grandma said, “How did you enjoy the wine,” then they both laughed. Luckily, I’d vomited to get it out of my stomach. I was feeling well when Mom and Dad came to get me. Neither grandpa nor grandma mentioned my wine drinking or my sickness. Grandpa winked knowingly at me when I got into the car. I smiled and winked back at him. Mom and Dad never found out about my drunken weekend.
For a week, sometimes more, grandma, grandpa and I looked as if we wore purplish-blue gloves and socks. When I was at my school’s gym class, where we changed into shorts, I got teased until I mentioned wine making. Then the laughter stopped. My friends wanted me to get some wine, but I said I could not do it, because Grandpa always locked the garage cellar door. Not true, but it placated the alcohol thirsty group of adventuresome friends.
Every other weekend, I would stand transfixed on that sidewalk looking at the driveway while in a state of wonder and joy. That only lasted two or three more years when grandpa died of a stroke and grandma died of a broken heart, though relatives wanted me to believe it was a physical heart attack, but, to me, it was an emotional broken heart. Before grandma died she told me how much grandpa Frank enjoyed me like a son that he never had (they had four girls) and that he wished we could have spent time together when he was younger and had more energy. She said that he talked about me and how much he loved me. I cried. Still do, sometimes.
While the thought of them faded slightly over the decades, my love for them never did. They are both indelibly etched in my mind with wonderful days, events, and memories that most kids probably don’t experience with their grandparents. I feel sorry for those who’ve not had the superb memories like I still have.
Now, decades later, as I drink wine, my thoughts frequently drift to grandma and grandpa. The smell and taste of the wine quite often makes me remember Grandpa Frank and Grandma Mary, especially the tunnel of grapes and the wine-making weekend. It usually brings tears to my eyes, but not so much from sadness as it is from joy about the too short time I had with them. They are valuable, precious memories especially now that I also approach the end of my life, as they had. I hope that I leave such memories to my loved ones. What a wonderful departing gift that would be. I often imagine Grandpa Frank and Grandma Mary standing together, in their open garage, looking down the driveway at me, holding their arms out for me to come and get hugs of love.
Now my own family is my light at the end of the tunnel.
In vino veritas (Latin) = In wine lies the truth.
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