Gordon Forgey: A good day to smile

Despite the solemnity often attached to it, Memorial Day is a good time to smile.

In my case, one reason to smile is dear Auntie Grace.

I would visit her often at her beach house. Sometimes a cousin would join us. Neither of us were yet in school.

Auntie Grace would wake us just as the sun was rising and send us off fishing at the public pier by ourselves. She gave us a drop line and a quarter each. We’d fish for a while and then go to the bait shack and buy our very own cup of hot chocolate. We always got a fortune back in change.

These were grand adventures of independence.

We always had fish to take back. Whether we caught our own or not, the baitman would give us a fresh catch. His was always bigger, probably because he could go all the way to the end of the pier.

Visits with Auntie Grace were easy and warm. The fun and adventure never seemed to end, although we did have to watch the Lawrence Welk Show with her. It was new to television then. So, in fact, was television.

We often helped her make bread. She insisted that we knead the dough by playing catch with it. Nobody worried about the two second rule. We played our own version of Canasta while the bread baked.

Auntie Grace shared her wisdom, helped us learn important things and eased some fears. Visits with her never lasted long enough.

She was born in 1881. She said she cried when President Garfield was shot and when the USS Maine exploded and sank in Havana Harbor. Teddy Roosevelt was her lifelong hero, so was her husband who had died early in her life. She had owned one of the first automobiles, but she never understood how airplanes stayed in the air. Her life had once been saved by a new drug called penicillin. Only a few years before our visits, she would occasionally scan the Pacific from her porch for Japanese submarines.

She is dead now and has been for nearly a half century.

Still, she lives on and brings a smile.

This may be what Memorial Day is all about.

Gordon Forgey

Publisher