Word of the Day

… courtesy of Merriam Webster, with slight modifications by me:

The Word of the Day for October 24, 2009 is:
gruntle • \GRUN-tul\ • verb

: to put in a good humor

Felix’s Example Sentence:

The grandchildren are unsurpassed in leaving me wonderfully gruntled after a visit, and eager for the next time.

Did you know?

The verb “disgruntle,” which has been around since 1682, means “to make ill-humored or discontented.” The prefix “dis-” often means “to do the opposite of,” so people might naturally assume that if there is a “disgruntle,” there must have first been a “gruntle” with exactly the opposite meaning. But actually, “dis-” doesn’t always work that way — in some rare cases it functions instead as an intensifier. “Disgruntle” developed from this intensifying sense of “dis-” plus “gruntle,” an old word meaning “to grumble.” In the 1920s, a writer humorously used “gruntle” to mean “to make happy” — in other words, as an antonym of “disgruntle.” The use caught on. At first “gruntle” was used only in humorous ways, but people eventually began to use it seriously as well.

Great-Grandmother Dance

“Dance” was the name by which her grandchildren and great-grandchildren called my Great-grandmother Rose Jones Lancaster Love.  Dance was the only great-grandparent I recall knowing, I was sixteen when she died. She had married young, nobody knew exactly how young, for the exact year she was born she never revealed. A tiny, stooped little lady who was kind, but nonetheless formidable.

Rose Jones Lancaster Love

She gave us the run of her house when we visited, exacting proper behavior and  requiring picking up after ourselves before we left. The only picture I have of Dance appears here, from perhaps the mid-nineteen forties. Well into her old age she could do embroidery, needle work and made cozies of thread for the cocktail glasses which were brought out for the adults on every visit. I have been told by my parents that one drink was all they got from Dance, but it was invariably robust to the point of lasting throughout dinner.

Dance had no toys for children in her house, but she did have a large poker set complete with several sets of cards, and many poker chips. We busied ourselves with building card houses, stacking chips like trees or bushes grouped around the pasteboard constructions.

When the houses collapsed, we built them again, or played made-up games of cards. Occasionally we might forget ourselves and throw chips at each other, but one piercing look from Dance’s keen and unclouded eyes brought us up short.

The clean-up process was quite educational, as it happened, since the decks of cards had to be grouped into complete decks by suit and color, including the pattern on the backs, which were different for each deck.

Dinner was always formal, sit down with the children at the main table. We were always interested in the buzzer concealed beneath the carpet by Dance’s chair, ready to be pressed to summon Gussie, the cook, from the kitchen with the different courses. We never quite dared to press this buzzer ourselves, though. I don’t think my grandchildren would be similarly deterred.

Dance grew up in the piney woods of southeastern Georgia, near Folkston, close to the Florida line, just to the east of the Okefenokee Swamp. I never knew this until much later in life. Odd to find it out, as the comic strip Pogo was one of my favorites, and I am sure discussions on the comics would have been interesting, although not so much to Dance. Her family had a turpentine business, tapping pine trees for sap, distilling it into turpentine and selling it to various customers. Dance was visiting a school friend in Chattanooga when she met George Dent Lancaster, and in due course married him. Her first child, Marshall, was born in 1898. My grandmother Phyllis was born in 1901. When it came time to record her birth for her tombstone, her second husband, Walter Love and my grandmother computed her likely birth year as 1878. That would have made Dance 83 when she died in 1961. A good old age for someone born in the South under Reconstruction, in depressed times.

George’s story is more detailed, and more lively. I will get to my Great-grandfather in another post.

Fishing with the Colonel

When I was eleven, my grandfather the Colonel took me to Savannah beach for a fishing trip, just the two of us. My grandparents had just moved back to Augusta for my grandfather’s retirement, and my mother and grandmother were occupied with cleaning up the house from the tenants who had lived there for the years Boozle was posted elsewhere. Menfolk were an encumbrance for such undertakings, so we were dispatched to the beach for a male bonding weekend.

We spent hours on a pier dangling our lines in the ocean, with little result except for one small fish I insisted on placing in our cooler. Then I went swimming. My grandfather, who could deny his grandchildren nothing, rented a float for me to paddle around in the surf. I stroked it out into the calmer water beyond the breakers, and drowsed away an hour or two. Not liking to squint into the sun, I stayed on my belly, the fish belly white of my back exposed to the August sun. My grandfather finally managed to get me to shore, and we walked back to the motel. My back was already on fire, and I soaked in the freshwater fountain in the motel courtyard, cooling my reddening shoulders and back. My grandfather, beginning to be alarmed, bought some Noxema cream to spread on my back. It did no good, and by morning, after a sleepless night, blisters the size of half dollar coins were popping up on my shoulders.

The trip back to Augusta was long and agonizing, for me due to the pain of my scorched back, for my grandfather by the thought that he had failed to protect me from myself. The Colonel was absolutely devoted to all of us grandchildren, and his mental and emotional pain was at least as painful as my physical suffering.

Days of lying on the couch in an upstairs room, belly down with cloths soaked in tea spread across my blistered back followed our return, with my mother and grandmother in constant attendance on me. My grandfather hovered in the background, suffering such guilt that my grandmother refrained from chastising him after the initial shock of seeing my back.

Fifty years later, my grandparents and my mother are gone, and the story of my sunburned back I can relate with no sense of pain. I am sure that until his death, my grandfather remembered that day with undiminished pain. Parenthood and grandparenthood have made  me understand what he felt. Where love is felt so strongly, responsibility for pain remains long after the event.

Georgia Roads and Childhood Vacations

From 1949 until 1989 the city of Augusta, Georgia was home between postings to my grandfather the Colonel and Thelly, his wife, known to us as The General. The Colonel died in 1969, but Nana, my grandmother, lived on in Augusta until moving to a retirement high rise in Marietta.

For most of my young childhood, the house they called home was an old frame building on Monte Sano Avenue. In the years before the interstate was complete between Chattanooga and Atlanta, and then onto Augusta, we spent part of most summers and many Christmases in Augusta, except for the years when the Army sent my grandparents to other postings.