Under The Influence

I spent summers with my grandparents as a boy. My grandfather seemed old to me then, but he was only in his forties, just half his life lived. His days were ruled by routine. Up at 3 AM, he’d leave for his job at the Cedar Rapids city-bus garage. Grandmother, awake with him for the moment, packed his lunch: a steel thermos of Folgers, white-bread sandwich of beef or pork, hard-boiled eggs in their shells, and a kolache or sugar-dusted piece of poppy-seed coffee cake. This was their life, year after hardworking year, until the cancers and heart disease, then the divvying-up of the backyard junk that some in my family coveted as potential antique gold (but was, alas, simply rusty junk in the end), the eventual razing of the house that held so many memories, and the final distribution of an estate that wasn’t much but somehow held five hundred dollars for each of us grandkids... More here.

Well worth some minutes of your time.