cognitivedissonance - 2014-07-23
My grandfather was in Korea. Staunchest, hardest Puritanical Methodist that ever lived. He never saw an ounce of combat and sat back at HQ working in the quartermaster corps. He has eaten the same meal every day since as long as anybody living can remember (cream of mushroom soup, buttered bread, Ovaltine, all three meals). The guy claims to be able to quote the entire New Testament from memory, and has opened something like four separate food banks in the Yakima/Wenatchee area.
The thing is, he was born an extremely wealthy man. At some point in the 1950s, he was set to inherit an unbelievably vast chunk of Idaho and several lumbermills. He declined his inheritance on purely moral based reasons and never spoke to his family ever again. His father tried to talk him down out of his highminded Christian principles, and he was disowned for it. He married my grandmother, who is the opposite of him in every way. Where he is dour, strict and incredibly judgemental, she is flighty, outgoing and wildly spacy and frankly a flibbertygibbet. They were doomed from the start. The divorce papers came a day early, before he had a chance to pack. He was intending to just disappear. He was in the middle of preparing when my grandmother was served and he left my mother and siblings with nothing more than a suitcase and a single suit. I've always had a strange admiration for his dedication to principles. I feel I have inherited his intensity.
My mother's side is all these high minded, deeply Anglo-Saxon salt of the earth people. My father's side is all these seedy con-artists and creeps. My two grandfathers never met, and they'd have hated each other to their very cores. Grandfather on my dad's side was a tie tailor. He made ties. It was a niche product. He was also a guitarist and from what I understand, a Beatnik.
Sometimes I think about the combination of genes that went into making me and am boggled.
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