The End of an Era

A long, beautiful era

Left to right: Inge & Ken Thomas, Margaret & Ed (Clyde) Jones

This picture was taken at my sister’s wedding in 2010. It was the end of one of those dances where they bring all the married couples out to dance and then whittle the slow-dancing crowd down by saying something along the lines of, “If you’ve been married more than a year, keep dancing.” Then five, then ten, then twenty, thirty, etc. I believe this picture was taken somewhere north of forty when all that remained on the dance floor were my four grandparents. They all looked pretty proud of themselves there, didn’t they?

As they should have.

I had a very unusually fortunate childhood. As a young kid, the status quo, as I understood it, was that everyone had four grandparents. They were all alive, still married, and a joy to be around. If you wanted to see them, they were only a twenty to thirty-minute car ride away and sometimes, when you were lucky, they would stay after dinner and tuck you into your own bed at night. However, even as a young child, it was apparent that these two sets of people were very different.

My dad’s parents, Ken and Inge Thomas, were every small human’s impression of the perfect grandparents. Grandpa laughed his ass off at Wile E. Coyote with me, Grandma pulled pantyhose over her head to make herself look scary, their clown-head Nabisco jar was full of Oreos, and the squeakiest drawer in their kitchen was chock-full of all sorts of candy and sweets. I always thought that drawer was ironic. You could get almost anything out of the kitchen unnoticed except for sweets yet there never seemed to be much penalty for doing so. I wonder now if they simply counted the squeaks throughout the day and there was a set threshold in place where they would step in and cut us off, if needed. If such a threshold existed, I don’t know that it was ever enforced. In one corner of their basement was a little grocery store of Grandma’s creation. The shelves were full of empty boxes and containers that used to contain everything from butter and crackers to powdered garlic (I loved sniffing the garlic container back then and I still do today) and there was a toy cash register where you could ring all your ‘purchases’ up. I could go on but suffice it to say, Grandma and Grandpa Thomas’s house was a child’s paradise.

My mom’s parents, Ed and Margaret Jones, were more dry. I loved them just as much but they weren’t as much fun. (You have to remember, that I’m speaking from the viewpoint of a very young child here.) They taught me games and new skills, took me for long walks in the woods to play in the creek, and always had a bag of expertly seasoned oyster crackers in the pantry. When they came home from one of their long trips to various countries, you were expected to sit next to Grandma on the couch as she narrated every single picture that Grandpa took on their travels. At night, Grandma would read in her chair and Grandpa would try to use his feet to prop his moccasins against each other in an inverted V and see if they would stay that way. I think I knocked them over on more than one occasion. Plenty of books were read, art was created, and acorns were collected at Grandma and Grandpa Jones’s house.

Of course, there were similarities between the two houses. Books were read, candy was eaten, and laughs were had at both houses. Love and joy and gratitude filled the space between the four walls at both the Joneses and the Thomases. It’s just that, well, sweet and savory taste very different, don’t they? I wouldn’t give up either flavor, though, and sometimes you need one to balance the other.

Left: Thomases Right: Joneses

As I grew older, the tides shifted a bit.

I loved my Thomas grandparents, and their house, for the nostalgia and the childhood memories they helped create that were such a large part of my identity at the time. When things were hard, I went there to feel comforted and safe again. When relatives were in town, everyone gathered at 3039 Marmac and partied. Hard. It’s almost like the walls of reality were thinner there and a little bit of magic seeped out into the world.

At the Jones’s, though, the deeper conversations were had. They made me think. On many occasions as a young adult, one who now drove a car and worked a ‘real job',’ I walked out of the Jones house wondering if I talked too much. Did I dominate the conversation? Was it all about me? Did anyone else get to talk? You see, they had a way of showing an interest in you and your life to such a degree that these thoughts could happen afterward. Their questions were pointed and specific and the conversation never stopped. I think it was here that my desire to go deep and my ambivalence toward small talk both grew. So yeah, I probably did talk most of the time and it was all about me; they liked it that way.

Looking back, I think of my grandparents like bookends on the shelf of my life. Those bookends were very close together at one point but stepped further and further to either side as I filled my life up with new chapters and new books. I knew that one day those book ends would start to fall away and I hoped to God that when they did, I had placed my books correctly: the wide, solid ones on the outside and the floppy, thinner ones in the middle. Hopefully then, they would all stay standing.

When I was in my teens, my Grandpa Jones was one of the most consistent fixtures of my life. When I think back, I realize he was the only person who made a repeated and intentional effort to be a part of my life and spend quality time with me. My 20s were filled with an unbelievable amount of change, some of it impossibly hard, most of it beautiful. We didn’t see each other as much then but he was still there through all of it. I didn’t know it until the TIAs and small strokes began to chip away at his mind, but he was my rock under the surface. This first bookend was removed from the shelf in July of 2016 when Grandpa Jones passed. It was not sudden and therefore not unexpected but I still wasn’t ready for it. He was 86 and had been one of the healthiest people I knew. It felt way too soon and changed me in incredibly profound ways. I was by his bed when he passed and have never felt emotions as strongly as I did then, in the following weeks, and just about every time I’ve thought of him since.

A few short months later, in November of 2016, Grandpa Thomas passed. He had been dealing with Parkinson’s for years and his breathing was a constant challenge. While his death also wasn’t unexpected, it did seem to happen too fast. When Grandpa Jones was declining, I didn’t know how to have the conversation I wanted to have with him, which was to tell him how much he meant to me. His jumbled mental state was probably part of why. I ended up doing so next to his deathbed. I don’t know if he heard me or not but I said it. So when my dad texted me at work one morning and said “Grandpa is really alert today and with it” I left almost immediately. My dad and uncles left the room after I got there and it was just me and Gramps. You know what is really hard? Starting a conversation with your Grandpa to tell him how great he has been and how much you will miss him. Why? Because you are implicitly telling him he is about to die. That sucks; there is no way around it. I remember tentatively starting with “I don’t want to scare you, but…” and ending with, “You’ve been a great Grandpa.” He said I had been a wonderful grandson and he smiled at me. As hard as it was, he heard me and I knew it. He died days later and while I wasn’t at his bedside through the process, I did make it there minutes after. A bookend on the other side was gone.

Another blessing of my younger life was that I had no major scrapes with death until that year. Two great-grandparents and my dad-away-from-dad, Brian Howard, were as close as I got. This made it even harder to lose two of the most important men in my life in such a short time period. Over the next few years, Death and I got much more acquainted as Jenelle and I said goodbye to her father and all four of our pets in close succession. It was a dark time and I remember wondering when one of my kids would die because surely that was the next step, right?

That never happened, thankfully, and life went on.

Fast forward to May of 2023 and Grandma Jones was declining rather quickly. She was very much like Grandpa in that she was intentional about maintaining relationships when she was able enough to do so; which was the case up until she was 92 years old. For a good long while, she had a standing weekly breakfast date with my wife and children. I was at work and joined them on precious few occasions, but it meant so much to me that she wanted to see my spouse and my kids so regularly. She already meant the world to me but through these breakfast dates, she began to mean more to them as well. Unlike the grandpas, when she began to decline, it was gradual at first and spread out over a long period of time. Eventually, her quality of life just wasn’t great. We knew it and she knew it too. It wasn’t long before she was talking of death. Her time had come and she was ready for it which, in turn, meant we were ready for it too. It sounds strange to say, but it’s true. Her passing was hard but it was made easier because of that. I was there the day before she died and said goodbye along with my two boys who knew her so much better than they would have if she hadn’t made the effort to show them. The next day, one side of the bookshelf was left to stand on its own.

It is now August of 2024 and all my books are standing freely. They aren’t wobbling and they aren’t falling over. After a very hard week and an extended dying process, which honestly did feel entirely unexpected, Grandma Thomas, A.K.A. Granny, passed away. It happened yesterday morning, Thursday, August 22nd, thirty minutes before I woke up. I was tired, as we all were. A group of us had oscillated between somber vigils around her bed because we thought it was time and laughing our slap-happy asses off in the other room when we realized it clearly wasn’t, until 3 am that same morning. Many hours were spent there by all of us throughout the week. As hard as it was, it was a gift that she was finally going. Soon to turn 93, Granny had been plagued by dementia for years. Her mind had failed a long time ago but that SISU-powered body just kept on going and going. When an unfortunate fall set up a boxing match between her noggin and the drywall mere months ago, the drywall lost. Handily.

Earlier I said that maybe the bounds of reality were thin at the Thomas Grandparents’ house but that might have been misguided. I think it actually was Granny who brought the magic. I know this is getting long but please, hang tight for just a minute longer. I want to tell you about my oversized slice of Granny-magic but, before I do, take a look at this shadow box she made for me about twenty years, or nearly half my lifetime, ago.

Not pictured: The water tower

I was the first Thomas grandchild. This meant that I soaked up a lot of Granny’s love before the other five suckers came along. They still got quite a lot, though; she had a lot to give.

As I said before, Grandma and Grandpa Thomas lived on Marmac Avenue. Their backyard butted up to Living Hope Church and beyond that was a road that dead-ended at a water tower. Beyond that was a barn and hayfields. South Airport Road ran perpendicular to all this as a traffic-filled barrier between their house and an orchard of some sort. When I was real young, we would go to the alley beyond the church and watch the tractor “poop” out big round bales of hay. I seem to have a vague memory of the barn and its many cats but I can’t be sure about that. I don’t know if we were brave enough to cross the busy road over to the orchard or not. Suffice it to say, this was a time before the arrival of the Grand Traverse Mall, Walmart, Home Depot, etc.

The log you see us sitting and adorably sipping from the same cup on as if we were lovers (we were, in the purest sense) was at the dead end and the water tower stood to the left of the picture and above us, if memory serves me right. I don’t know who the hell took the picture because as far as I remember, nobody ever came with us on those walks. Obviously, that’s not the case and I’m sure my sister joined us at some point but in my memory, it’s me and Grandma and not a single other person. We would sit on the log, rip apart the milkweed pods, and do whatever else seemed right for the day. We did this hundreds of times and I refuse to believe you when you say that’s impossible.

The highlight, for me, was bringing along the two plastic boats from the bathtub toys. Along the road ran a narrow creek. It ran through culverts and somehow managed to continue existing even after the mall was built. There we deposited our boats and followed them on their way. They conquered every culvert and I was delighted each time they came out the other side. They even made the long journey under the road towards the end and out into the marshy field on the other side. Magic.

We would stop, sit on the deteriorated log, and gaze up at the water tower. Sometimes we would eat and others we would not. I’m making that up. Who the hell remembers what you did or did not eat on a walk with Granny? Afterward, we made it into the field on the other side and I remember there was a large pond there. It was probably small but to me, it was large. One time we found some flat pieces of styrofoam. I don’t remember how we did this but I swear we made masts and sails for them and then set them out into the pond. They blew to the other side, caught in the tall grasses, and stuck there.

After this, we would follow a trail and come around to the backside of the subdivision and the ass-end of Marmac Avenue. Our route was a simple oval and made perfect sense but blew my mind every time. How did we travel out into such majestic wilderness and end up back here on this nondescript street?

Granny-magic, that’s how.

So here I am, at almost exactly 38 and 1/2 years old without a single grandparent for the first time in my life. Stunning, isn’t it? The thing is, they aren’t gone; not even a little bit. Each one of them made such an imprint on my life and hung around long enough so that I could truly appreciate it.

Thanks for all the memories Grandma and Grandpa Jones, and Grandma and Grandpa Thomas. I’ll miss you forever.

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