Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Nana & Dindaddy's 60th Wedding Annivarsary

A few weeks ago I joined my grandparents and a few other family members on a trip to Augusta for a trip down memory lane. My grandparents were celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary and my mom thought it would be great to revisit a few of those years. My grandparents live in August in the late forties and into the fifties before moving to the Atlanta area because of a job transfer.

We visited their old, small house, their church, my grandfather's Tri-State Tractor office (which is now a church), the home of my mom's childhood piano teacher, and one of their favorite restaurant destinations; Luigi's. It seems Luigi's had changed quite a bit over the years. While the food was good, apparently it used to be GREAT! I heard them remark so many times about how much times had changed. They remarked on how Augusta used to be a pretty good place for opportunity, but is now a rather depressed area.

I did find out that my grandmother was a rather feisty young lady in those days. She explained how my grandfather's coworker kept telling her that one of the office secretaries was putting the moves on my grandfather. She became jealous and even walked a few miles to confront her in person about it. Fortunately the secretary wasn't there because my grandmother said she was going to berate her so bad my grandfather might have lost his job. As it turns out, the secretary was not flirting with my grandfather. She was messing around with my grandfather's coworker though... the one who was getting my grandmother all riled up in the first place. Turns out he was trying to get some of the guilt/pressure off of himself.

We also visited the grave sites of two of my uncles. One of them, Michael, died in infancy in the 50's, and the other, Joe, passed away in 1995 in a car accident.

Sadly we were unable to locate Michael's marker and were afraid it was lost. However, this is a "perpetual care" cemetery (something I had never heard of) and these sorts of things are not supposed to happen in a perpetual care cemetery. My grandfather, my uncle Ronnie and I went to the office and asked the undertaker about it. He sifted through a file and found the original sales slip for the marker, confirming that it was supposed to me there.

We all headed back out to the plot where the marker was supposed to be. The undertaker surveyed the site for a few moments with a rather perplexed look on his face before pulling a ball point pen from his pocked. He stabbed the ground with it repeatedly. After a few stabs we all heard a metallic "clink". He found the marker, which was buried beneath two or three inches of sandy soil.

The undertaker claimed that the marker was originally placed on a cement slab, which over time disintegrated and sank into the ground. I think that's a bit fishy, but my grandfather decided to upgrade to a granite slab anyhow to prevent this type of thing from happening again. None of the other markers that were placed on granite seemed to be sinking, so perhaps there's some truth to his story.

Anyway, it was good to spend time with my grandparents and hear their stories. Some of them I had heard before, but it was great to hear them in context, at the places where they actually happened.

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Links of Interest

California fires from the space shuttle
American Consumption - An artist's visual representation of our wastefulness
God's email inbox
Harvard goes Halo - Reminds me of the R2-D2 prank someone did at MIT in 1999.
Stephen Colbert Announces Run for White House! - I can't wait to see how this turns out!

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