Set Passage for

NCTE Dialect Recording

 “My Eccentric Grandfather"

            My grandfather put his poor old Ford car out to pasture in 1940, and for fourteen years he rode the train four mornings and four afternoons a week, getting up at 5:00 A.M. on Tuesdays and Thursdays to light the sooty old oil burner, boil his pot of coffee, and catch the dairy route man as he drove past to get his orange juice and his daily bottle of milk  After he had taken his bath, he had his half-slice of toast, his glass of orange juice, his milk, and his cup of coffee.  Then he put on his bulky overcoat with his its fur collar, stepped into the yard, waited two or three minutes for the local bus, and boarded the train which was due at 8:00 A.M.

            What he did during the eight hours he was in his office we never knew.  Perhaps it was just as well that his business was foreign to us, because grandfather always took a rather calm, if not downright careless, attitude toward the law.  My sister Mary used to say that she didn’t care what he did as long as he fought his suits in the courts and not in the family.

            On Saturdays and when he came home at night, he might water the lawn or perhaps borrow a hammer or a wheelbarrow from Mrs. Forrest, his next-door neighbor, in a vain attempt to start the long overdue jobs of patching his roof or cleaning his garage, which was filled with everything from broken mirrors to broken music boxes, from rusty scissors to rusty funnels, not to mention a crop of horrid wasps which had haunted the place for years.  I can still remember seeing a lot of paper towels in an abandoned chicken coop near the raspberry bed, with a hank of knotted yarn coiled around a whetstone on top of the whole mess.

            When the time came for dinner, grandfather would put a can on the fire and heat up some greasy stew from the night before, open a can of tomatoes, prop a book up before him, and eat right from the stove.  He never seemed to take much interest in food, anyway, and there weren’t a lot of dishes to wash that way.  I guess his stomach, teeth, and gums didn’t object.

            After he had rinsed off his cooking utensils, grandfather would try to get some dance music on the radio.  However, his radio was pretty poor, so he seldom got it tuned in properly.  He would worry about this and turn it on very loud—his ear for a beautiful air was, I fear, a tin one.  Then he would sit down with his newspaper and amuse himself with the horrors of the world—a new government in France, a scandal in Washington, a revolution in Latin America, a family murder on Long Island.  He had a fine time with them all, and always said that though life was no laughing matter, it was not matter if you laugh.

            When he was tired of the bleating of the radio and the drought of international affairs, he would call his yellow mongrel dog in his loud hoarse voice.  When he had rubbed him briskly with his palms and told him what a nice creature he was, he took him out and locked him in the barn by the creek for the night.

            Then he came back in the house, drained a nice warm glass of milk, and climbed the stairs to his room.  After he had brushed his short white beard until it shone to the roots, he went to bed to sleep the sleep of the just.