Gran is 80
My grandfather (Gran) is turning 80 in January and to celebrate, my grandmother (Gram) threw him a party last weekend. It was quite out of the ordinary, my mom isn’t sure whether Gran has ever had a birthday party before or Gram has ever thrown a party. It was fun, just about everyone who was invited was able to come, totaling 50 people, including all of my uncles and various cousins on my mom’s side who we never see. My uncle Wayne collected stories about Gran for a walk down memory lane, so here are mine.
Probably my earliest memories of being with Gran are sitting with him at his Apple IIE, specifically apple’s first paint program. I remember painting some pretty nice pictures in black and green, lots of dinosaurs and robots. The idea hasn’t changed much between that program and photoshop, except for the addition of colors and pictures and all. Gran patiently showed me how to use it and encouraged me to artisticly progress from squiggles to actual images.
Then we started programming, probably in logo to begin with and then basic. Once I got the hang of logo I really liked making all sorts of crazy star shapes, especially ones where the turtle had to go around a few times to make it symmetric. Gran was very methodical in teaching me about FWD, PEN UP, and the other commands. Then on to BASIC, which taught me the fundamentals of IF THEN ELSE and interacting with a person (me). I wrote some number guessing games, but then Gran said, “Take a look at this game that I wrote,” the Oregon Trail. Before I’d learned anything about using the computer’s memory, here was a game with graphics where you could fire a shotgun at a deer, and if you timed it just right you’d get to eat it.
Besides computers, Gran always had a chess set out and ready to play. There were the giant plastic chess men on the big vinyl board, the medium sized wooden pieces on the folding board, the little plastic set from toys r us. The wooden folding one seems like the perfect chess set, perfectly weighted, perfectly sized, nicely shaped, durable, a very nice set to learn to play on. Gran taught me how the pieces moved, how the game was supposed to go, some elementary strategy. I don’t think my game has developed much since Gran taught me to get control of the center of the board early and then castle.
Other fragments of memories float around in my head. There were all of the movies and TV shows that Gran methodically taped and labeled in his own inscrutable system, including an endearingly odd live-action version of Alice in Wonderland that we watched a few too many times. There was the Chloraseptic always ready to battle a sore throat. There was Gran always napping wherever he could after dinner, before dinner, or whenever he could. And there were numerous New Year’s sleepovers, watching the Mummer’s parade on Gram and Gran’s living room floor.