Farm & Food File: The everyday often isn’t every day

When you’re 8 or 9 years old, you don’t see the world as you will as a 50- or 60-year-old. Much of what seems perfectly ordinary to a child often becomes quite extraordinary with the passing of time.

For example, as a young boy I had six grandparents: my father’s mother and father, my mother’s father and mother, and my father’s maternal grandmother and grandfather. That seemed ordinary to me then, but is now extraordinary.

Mom’s father was Harry, a Depression-crushed farmer resurrected as a skilled carpenter. Dad’s dad was Victor who, after two years in the seminary, changed direction and became a stock and bond broker.

His father-in-law and my Dad’s grandfather was Henry, a retired blacksmith that everyone but family called Hank.

Their spouses, respectively, were Lottie, Ruth and Clara. All were strong, smart women who led by example. Two never drove a car and the third probably shouldn’t have.

Looking back at that lineage, it’s hard to see where my father, a dairy farmer, found his calling. He was no carpenter and he and Mom had more children, six, than money, so he never needed his father’s specialty.

And while Dad was competent with the farm’s Lincoln welder, he often paid the local smithy to repair equipment that needed to stay together longer than one day of use by his machinery-bending Uncle Honey or one season with his easily distracted sons.

Despite all these generations of fathers — and mothers — in my youth, I don’t remember celebrating one Father’s or Mother’s Day with any of them. In fact, I don’t know if the thought of either day ever crossed our minds.

Part of the reason might be that we already spent much of our free time — usually some part of most Sundays — together.

Since all six grandparents lived in the same small southern Illinois town and attended the same Lutheran church, everyone usually visited after the late Sunday service.

Grandma Ruth, the self-appointed social director of the family, often stretched those Sunday visits into dinners of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, milk gravy and two kinds of pie.

Few, including my very overworked mother, ever objected to Grandma seizing the day, family, or menu.

Then, as the heat of those languid Sunday afternoons took charge, a card table or two appeared on Grandpa’s shady carport so adults could play pinochle and cool off with an icy Falstaff beer.

In the background, a radio played our summer soundtrack, that day’s St. Louis Cardinals baseball game.

Then, by 3:30 p.m., my mother would steer us to the car so my father could be back on the farm in time for the evening milking.

Later, when my older brothers and I got our driver’s licenses, we left the card games, the grandparents and Dad and Mom for the milking parlor.

Harry, my mother’s father and the most quiet of the six, was the first to pass. That was late 1962 and the first time I heard the word “cancer.”

Three years later, both my great grandparents — each in their late 80s — died, the ailing Henry in March and wheelchair-bound Clara in September.

Grandpa Vic, their son-in-law, was buried on his wife Ruth’s 67th birthday on a postcard-perfect September day in 1969.

Both my grandmothers, Ruth and Lottie, remained active until 1988 when I last visited Ruth while she helped the St. John’s Ladies Aid serve Lottie’s funeral dinner. Eight months later and again in September, the same ladies served Ruth’s funeral dinner.

And now, as another “Day” approaches, my mind goes to all those fathers and mothers who gave me so much of themselves and how ordinary it all seemed and how extraordinary it truly was.