Harrumph!

“I have to stop and stretch my leg,” my grandfather used to say when he was driving my sister and me to his home for the summer. That really meant he’d have a beer while we did an orange soda, to our palettes — Pal for her and Tru-Ade for me.

These were long rides on routes without interstates or even four-lane highways, for years through the mountains of Western Virginia. We all had earned thirst, Granddad a bit more so.

Truth be told, he also really had a stiff leg. I understand that better following my recent break and operation. His version was when he was 54. He was a yard foreman for the B&O when he broke his leg upper and lower in four places. As a manager, he wasn’t supposed to do the hard labor, but a crew could not uncouple two cars and he took it on himself to climb up and free the link. He fell.

That was a meaningful summer, as my parents had divorced and my father remarried quickly. Although she had full custody, my mother let us visit them in Oklahoma, state of my birth. They decided to abuse the privilege by saying they intended to take us to Germany when the Army transferred him at the end of the summer. My grandfather would not have it any more than my other. With his leg in a cast from heel to hip, he drove with her over two and four-lane roads from the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia to Fort Sill to go to court and retrieve us. Tough dude.

He liked a couple of beers a day. Rather, in West Virginia it was beer-like objects, no greater than 3.2% alcohol, generally even less.

That was fine with everyone…except his wife, my grandmother. She grew up country and saw alcohol consumption at any level (even communion in the Methodist church meant grape juice) as sinful.

Granddad would stretch his leg, so to speak, on our trips, twice in six to eight hours of driving. When available, National Bohemian was his beer. The one-eyed Mr. Boh was as ubiquitous on billboards in the region as Mail Pouch was on barn sides.

I got a chuckle today seeing a review of cheap canned beers in the Washington Post.  National Bo won. Miller High Life (not that LITE junk) came in second. It was the favorite of half of my many uncles and great-uncles. The other half liked Rolling Rock.

Oddly and as an indication of my thickness, I was years into summers and holidays with my grandparents before I understood the beer and gardening dynamics. Even though his wife was damned hard to get along with and prickly and hypercritical of some of us — my mother, her own sister, my sister, me and of course Granddad — he was not inclined to divorce or infidelity or even giving back the lip. Instead, he spent many waking hours planting, weeding and growing gardens. He called them patches, although typically each was an acre or more. He sometimes had two a season. I bonded deeply with him and learned to love green life during those many summer days in the patch.

Much later, I realized that he escaped into the garden and took the edge off with a Bo.

Ironically, my  allegedly abstemious grandmother allowed herself seasonal sin. My mother would visit from wherever we lived holidays. God forbid that she forgot to bring a bottle of Mogen David blackberry wine, that syrup with a wine label. Somehow, the bottle became empty before the Easter, Thanksgiving or Christmas was past. We never saw her drink, but mirabile dictu, the wine disappeared!

Not amusing was when she was dying of bad kidneys and congestive heart failure. My mother and her sister, the nurse from New Mexico were both there at the end. My grandmother had requested a bottle of Mogen David, which they put in her bedside cabinet. When a hospital nurse found it, she yelled to the doctor that alcohol was forbidden in the hospital and they needed to pour it down the sink. He turned to her and firmly said, “She’s dying. Give her anything she wants!”

Thus my grandparents completed their individual cycles of transcending absolutism of alcohol.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, alcohol, beer, grandparents, West Virginia