“Remoted” – Day 416 (Thursday)

Since the day she was born, I have known May 6 to be my niece’s birthday. It was not until recently while doing genealogy research that I was aware it was also the birthday of Grandpa Simonds, born in 1906. Dad always referred to my Grandpa / his father, as “The Old Man.” 

We moved to the Simonds family home and lived upstairs from Grandpa after Grandma Olive died when I was four years old. As I understand it now, the plan was that my parents would help take care of my cousin who was being raised by Grandma Olive and The Old Man.

Grandpa and Grandma Simonds with some of my cousins.

I don’t remember much about Grandpa. He was tall and lanky and was a twin. He had a dog named Tippy. He wore plaid shirts and had hearing aids that never seemed to be turned up correctly, requiring lots of loud talking and repeating. He would flip his dentures in his mouth to both horrify and fascinate us kids and we would squeal when he did it. He liked to fish and would harvest night crawlers in the yard with a flashlight at night. Through family research I learned that Grandpa made the newspaper in 1949 for catching a 24-inch, 3.75 pound pickerel in Westminster. 

From the five-plus years we lived upstairs from Grandpa, there is just one specific memory of him from when I was in kindergarten or first grade. In those days, the public school bus didn’t provide curb service at each kid’s driveway and blow the horn until the kid finally emerged from the house. Kids congregated at an assigned bus stop, and if you weren’t there when the bus arrived, you were out of luck. My bus stop was a walk down our dead-end street and one block over to the corner of Main and School Streets in front of Quality Bakery. One morning, I arrived at the bus stop and there were no other kids there. Panic struck, and I ran home crying because I had missed the bus. Grandpa took me by my little hand and walked me back to the bus stop, and when we got there, other kids had arrived. I had just never been the first kid there before,

Most of the years living at Grandpa’s house contain only vague and isolated memories of him. Mom always bought Grandpa a new plaid shirt for Father’s Day and Christmas, and probably his birthday. I remember him driving a station wagon. When my sister was a toddler, she managed to get down the very steep flight of stairs, out the front door, and was walking down our street towards Main Street. Grandpa spotted her, ran outside, and scooped her up before she made it to the busy street.

For whatever reasons, after we moved from Grandpa’s house when I was ten, we didn’t see him much. Decades later, he moved to Virginia, where he died in January, 1998. As I recall it, it was after being found unconscious on the ice while ice fishing, but this could be inaccurate and I can’t find any information online.