Concern

Does anyone know what happened with dencoartist? I am concerned for him, and also for my drawings, which haven't returned from Denver yet.

Poppy

Free association week 189

1. Running :: on empty
2. Alternative :: thinking
3. Cope :: skills
4. Lots :: of tribbles
5. Sympathetic :: nervous system
6. Barn :: yard
7. Totally :: really
8. Baby :: tears
9. Undeniable :: truth
10. Watermelon :: seeds

One of my friends started writing portraits of grandparents a while back, and it seems a good idea. I knew six: all four of my grandparents and my mother's mother's parents. My family is long-lived; Mom knew all eight of her great grandparents, but I wasn't quite so lucky. I thought of starting with the ones I liked least, instead I'll work in the order they died.

Poppy was my great grandfather, William Kenneth Ford. I was named William after him. He went by Ken, just as I go by my middle name, Van. Born in 1884, he was 80 years old when I came along.

He eloped with my great grandmother. She was a daughter of German immigrants, probably not meeting the approval of his parents, who were reasonably well-off (my great great grandfather was a plumber). Poppy and Dommy lived in a bungalow across the street from Victoria Road Public School, where I attended until grade 2. Poppy had built the house soon after their marriage, at which time it was situated on the outskirts of Windsor, but by my time it was surrounded by a mature residential neighbhourhood. My grandmother and mother had grown up on that street and attended the same school as me. Every day when I walked home, Dommy and Poppy would watch for me and wave from the front door. Once a week I would meet Mom at their house after school.

Poppy came from a line of entrepreneurs. His grandfather was a co-founder of Queen's University and Ryerson University. Poppy was a draftsman by trade, and worked in a patent office in Detroit. Every day until he retired in his 70s he walked a distance of perhaps five kilometres from Windsor to work, through the tunnel to an office high in the Penobscot Building, tallest skyscraper in the Detroit skyline at that time.

Because of his job, he brought home many new inventions. One was an early home movie camera. Somewhere my family has remnants of a film showing Dommy sitting on the Windsor dock with my grandmother on her knee, a newborn baby in 1914. We also have colour photos of my mother and her siblings as small children in the 1930s.

I don't remember Poppy well, but Mom adored him. He was a gentle, reflective person, and she suggests I take after him. As an old man he had a quiet demeanour and a constant smile. Although my father is also artistic and musical, I suspect my creative bent is inherited somewhat from Poppy.

In 1972 my parents and I moved permanently to our cottage on Lake Erie, 45 minutes from Windsor, and we stopped seeing Dommy and Poppy so often. He went into the hospital, something to do with liver or kidneys. I remember going to visit him. It's one of my few specific memories of Poppy. He was up and about, but had a catheter emerging from under his robe. He went home after that, but soon went back to the hospital and died after a short illness in 1973. He was 89.

The funeral was a strange affair. When it came time for the coffin to be closed, the immediate family went to sit around it. Then a curtain was pulled around to give them privacy. While the rest of us sat outside, a loud wailing chorus erupted from within. Dommy, true to her German roots, was a kind and calm person, so I doubt this maudlin drama had much to do with her, more with my mother's family.

I inherited some small items: a few boxes of Pop-Tarts, which Poppy loved, and some bird eggs he had collected and blown in his younger life. I still have two of his books, The Little Seabird (by the author of "Little Fish Pedler," etc., no name is given) inscribed by his father, "Kingston, July 6th, 1878", and Milton's Poetical Works, given to, "Anna Maria Ford, Present from Uncle Havens, 1857".