A Grandfather's Perspective on...

Sometimes the things we say hurt other's feelings and we realize it and regret it but thoughts and emotions brought about by our everyday experiences sometimes fill us to the point we have to let them out. Sometimes, that's what a blog is for. Do we mean everything we say to the extent we have said it? No but if you are going to let off steam, the best thing is to preface it with an apology and then let it rip. Here goes.

Many things have changed and changed radically during my lifetime. No I am not talking about the price of a bottle of Coke (5 cents when I was a boy) or my weight or where I live. I am talking about changes in public opinions regarding previously accepted standards for ones lifestyle. I grew up never worrying about what my mother put on the table or whether she bought it from a local vegetable stand or a grocery store. We ate what she prepared and we were told by our Doctor that we were good healthy children and as long as we ate our meat, potatoes and vegetables and drank milk daily we would always be healthy and strong. We did and we are still relatively healthy and strong. In Biblical terms we are all going to make our allotted 3 score and 10 years and then some (barring any accidents or catastrophes).

My mother gave us oatmeal for breakfast and my Father gave us fried toast and eggs on weekends or Mother cooked French Toast or Pancakes. Lunch was a standard PB&J sandwich with Milk. Supper was meat and vegetables or a casserole. Mother did love casseroles (something she said was great about America, the casserole). I guess they don't make casseroles in Northern Ireland, the country of our birth. Saturdays all was the same except supper and that was a grand ensemble of leftovers and what was left from all of that, went to Lassie, our Cocker Spaniel and my first dear friend. However then came Sunday, oh Sunday. It was a day when we couldn't wait to get home from church and smell the excruciatingly wonderful aromas seeping through the house from the kitchen oven. Roast beef, chicken, ham and all the great side dishes that went with them were awaited with great anticipation until finally we heard, "okay, time to eat, let's go"! No one held back, no salads were served unless Mother was on a diet and then she had a salad for lunch during the week or cottage cheese and peaches. But not on Sunday! You ate, enjoyed and asked for seconds before your sisters got it. Then came dessert, simple fare during the week but always more magnificent on Sundays. No Jello or canned peaches or lemon bars or strawberries on lady fingers with whipped cream on Sundays. No Sundays there was a magnificent cake created and iced by the famed pastry chef, Ursula (my mother) or a presentation of a flaky crusted pie with ice cream. No boxed cake mixes or store bought pie shells allowed here. La Chef Magnifique made all from scratch and perhaps it was fitting that on Sundays we not only sang "Glory to God in the Highest" at church but that our tummys joined in a silent refrain of joy for which no musician has yet composed a fitting melody.

But all the culinary delectables aside, science and geeky men and women who probably never had a Mom who could cook more than a TV dinner, brought all this to a crashing halt. When we were already grown (and healthy) and in our 30's we were told our sacred Mothers had poisoned us! It was like someone stuck a razor blade in a Halloween Apple and America was forever terrified and stopped having Halloween at all. Oh God! What are we to do?! The lard that my mother used to fry with, bake with and flavor with was poison! The fantastically delicious Roast Beef that we ate on Sundays was toxic to our bodies! Potatoes, my heart's dearest love, potatoes and their calories spelled only doom for us all. Butter was toxic, gravy was taboo, milk would coat your arteries with sludge and what were we to do? Who stole the flake from the cake or the pastry!? Some evil geek Doctor raised on TV dinners and jello all his life! Find him, kill him and hang him up to display his perfidy and lies he brought upon us!

But no one listened to me. The geeks won. The war is over. I have come undone. Now we have vegetarians who give us dissertations on how to be humanitarians, how to save a leaf, a tree, a cow and be kind to our planet. Why is no one ever listening to me? I love a leaf, a tree and the beasts but I was taught that they all had a purpose and a place. Now you come and smack me in the face? You heartless soul, they say. You wastrel. You are the cause of all our impending doom. Your mother was a despicable murderer for feeding you the way she did they say. Your generation and theirs is responsible for every foul thing befalling this planet and your values and wants and desires should be packaged up and thrown in the trash. We disown you and your generations, they say. That is how a Grandfather feels. If everything he experienced in life and loved was wrong then his life was totally meaningless and his generation a total failure.

Then they say, oh no we didn't mean it that way. We just want to point out an improvement that you can make in your lifestyle and it will mean so much more to our health and our planet. What do I get, I ask? Your life will be extended 6 years. That is wonderful isn't it? Six more years to be old and now considered useless and my values and dietary habits to be tossed aside. Well my mother had something else in her possession, something we were not very fond of at all. So why don't you take that extra 6 years put it in Mother's enema bag and cram it where the sun don't shine. Oh and while you are at give me a piece of pie and a little ice cream.

I have had it and I am not going to take it anymore. It was my mother's generation and mine that brought us through wars, fought and conquered diseases like Polio, Smallpox, Measles Mumps and countless others. We developed and delivered the first space craft, the first man to walk on the moon. Oh yes we had our failures and our tribulations: the Edsel, Vietnam and others but we hung in there and kept coming and you know what; we also delivered the greatest accomplishments of our lifetimes. We gave life to our children. We loved them and raised them and I pray to God that in the big picture we did that right because now I am told we didn't do much of anything else right.

Please do me a favor when you see your parents today, tonight or whenever you can, say I love you, I still need you and your life was not worthless and all wrong. Then take them out to an ice cream parlor and buy them a sundae. Hey, they might even pay for it! LOL