Another Lame Post about My Heritage

I've already spent a post on my grandfather, who I knew very well. Now I'm going to waste your time with a post about my great-grandfather, who I knew not at all. I'll start at the end, which his death, which kind of serves as a good metaphor for his life. He died in his 60s or 70s after his truck either broke down or he ran off the road into a ditch. He was likely drunk and was struck and killed by another car while he was walking home.

My grandfather was originally from a town in north Georgia near Canton. He moved down with his father back when the area where I currently live was just being homesteaded and land was pennies an acre. My great-great grandfather didn't dig his new digs and moved back north, but Great Granddaddy persevered in the swamps and gradually moved up from a two-room shack to a fairly respectable farm house by local standards. It's actually the same house I grew up in, although my parents continued the process of gradual additions that would, in stop motion animation, make the house look like some sort of organic life form growing new limbs during its embryonic stage. This isn't wasn't what made him all that interesting. What made him interesting were his seemingly never-ending eccentricities.

First, my grandmother often described him as "the only person I ever knew who could earn a living by sitting on his ass." Now, I'm not exactly sure what she meant by that. He was a farmer (He ran cattle back before there were fences and grew the typical Southern cash crops of his era.) Farmers aren't typically known for being that successful by being lazy, but his family did pretty well and Granddaddy didn't really have any sob stories about the Depression. I'm not really sure it affected people who were pretty much self-sufficient with plenty of land and not in the part of the world suffering from the Dust Bowl as much as those in the Midwest and city folk.

Perhaps he supplemented his inefficient farming with moonshining. There is a shed just across and down the railroad tracks from my childhood home that was an active still back during Prohibition (and likely a bit afterward). The mason jars and rusted remnants of some of the equipment is still there. I used to go inside as a kid and imagine there were skulls inside under the collapsed shelves. And yes, I played on the railroad tracks as a kid. I think my parents may have even been aware of this fact. I've got a great story about that I can share at a later date. My family isn't exactly sure he financially benefited from the still in any way. It's not actually on our land, but we do know he would have been a major customer if he wasn't a partner in the business. Granny actually said he was a bit of a con who could get other people to do most of his work for him, so maybe that's how he managed to be a successful farmer without the hard labor one expects from his profession.

He was also apparently quite intelligent. He was known for being able to add up the serial numbers on the sides of the boxcars as the train passed his house. I'm rather impressed by this as I was able to easily master geometry and trigonometry and managed to pull an A in calculus despite not really mastering anything but I was never able to add that well. Multiplication and division were a bit tough to get consistently correct too. You ask me for the square root of 25, I'm as likely to tell you 6 or 4 as I am 5. It's not that I don't know any better. It's just that the right answer didn't come out first.

One thing I'm particularly proud of in my ancestor is the fact that he took the smoke house, which originally was intended for the curing of meat (hence the name) into a dark room in the early 1900s. My parents and my oldest aunt still have boxes of his old photography, both the glass daguerreotypes and the early paper prints. The smoke house is still in existence, and still referred to as the smoke house, although it serves as a humble storage shed now instead of serving either of it's early functions. That's kind of sad somehow.

He's also the first of the family that I know of to possess the intense obsession with fruit that the males members of my family all seem to share. I obsess over the perfect peach. My dad will buy gallons of fresh strawberries from a local farm every year and stock a year's worth of sliced berries in the fridge. He literally has more fruit in his cereal each morning than cereal between the bananas, strawberries and blueberries when those are in season. My grandfather was also obsessive about peaches. My great grandfather focused his food obsession on bananas. He'd not buy them by the hand (bunch for you losers), but by the the stalk, which contain dozens of the individual fruits. He'd buy them straight off the train and eat them all before the first one got even close to being overripe.

Of course there was the whole alcoholism thing. My oldest aunt remembers having to pick him up and drop him off at rehab in Atlanta back when they lived in the metro area when she was a kid. She doesn't have the fond memories of him that she does of her grandmother, which is understandable. She was actually afraid of him as a kid. My dad doesn't remember him that much, so basically can just enjoy the stories about him like I do.

Mickey said that my tale of my grandfather seemed to explain me. I really think I share more of the more outright bizarre personality traits of his dad than I do with him.