On Where you come from – Intro

Boys,

I don’t know a whole lot about my grandparents other than what I remember from having known them in my lifetime. My grandpa on my mom’s side moved away before I was born. I’ve met him a few times, but I don’t know much about who he is (still alive as I write this). So, I thought of my mom’s mom (Far Away Grandma) and my dad’s parents (Farm Grandma + Farm Grandpa) as the ones I knew growing up. After Tutu married Grampy (I realize writing this you might not call them these names anymore, but you do now so that is how I’ll write it)… so after Tutu marries Grampy, I got two new grandparents — Grandpa Pat and Grandma Rosie. Papa Rauch married Granda ‘Nisa and I got Grandpa Clarence and Grandma Mary. By the time I met all of them, I just called them Pat + Rosie, and Clarence + Mary.

So what I knew about everyone is just from what I remember and what I remember hearing about them growing up. The further time goes by, the more I question how much I remember and how much of it is actually true. My grandpa Kenny (aka Farm Grandpa) and Clarence were both veterans — Kenny drove tanks in the Korean War. My Grandma Kathy was very quiet, but I remember the last few years of her life, she began to open up at family gatherings and I always wondered what she might have been like growing up and raising my mom.

Your mom had a different experience. Your mom never met Papaw’s mom and dad, and she only really had a relationship (that I know of) with Memaw’s mom. They were close and your mom would visit her in Florida for many years when she was a young girl. Memaw’s dad was also a veteran, and did some really amazing things in his life — he helped design and build a golf course, and he also had a company that was one of the first, if not THE first, company to produce plastic bendy straws.

Anyway, I got to thinking about how cool it would be if I could know more about them in their own words. And that got me thinking about what I’m doing with this blog — the whole idea of this blog is to 1). let you understand more about your own life through my eyes and 2). let you understand more about me through my thoughts and my words.

What I will say about this blog is that it is the most authentic thing to the person I am that I could ever give you. How I write is exactly how I think. How I write is linear — meaning I start and I write as I think. I don’t revise (very often) and if you could sit inside my head and have a conversation with me, the person you’d be talking to would sound a lot like the words you’re reading now.

So, with ALL that being said, I want to give you something from your grandparents — written by them to you. I asked them to write about either growing up themselves or what it was like being a parent to your mom or me.

So I’m titling this series “On Where You Come From.” I want you to have something that you can read to understand your grandparents and where you come from in a similar way to the way I want you to understand who I am in reading this blog. I have so many stories and memories about each of your grandparents that I’ll be happy to share with you as you grow up, but I want you to also have something from them — in their own voice — that you can look back on and read and hopefully understand who they were a little better.

So with that being said, I hope you enjoy what’s to come!

Love you boys,

Dad