JULY 20, 2023 – (Cont.) Uncle Bruce rewarded my efforts—and his own—on the slopes by taking us to dinner at the Skyline Restaurant.  It was a Dick Hamilton family operation, Uncle Bruce explained, and accordingly, Uncle Bruce and I were treated royally thanks to his long-standing friendship with them.  The host and hostess, our waitress, …

JULY 19, 2023 -(Cont.) The next day we drove east on Route 9 to Hogback Ski Area, officially in the town of Marlboro, except I didn’t see any sign of a town, just beautiful scenery in all directions and limited signs of development.  There was the ski area on the south side of the big …

JULY 18, 2023 – (Cont.) In mid-December the following year—1967—the annual Christmas package arrived from Rutherford.  Gaga had put the usual, “Don’t open ’til Christmas” stickers on the outside, but from Christmases past, I knew that we didn’t have to worry: she had fully wrapped the presents inside the large parcel.  Thus, with one of …

JULY 17, 2023 – (Cont.) The next year would be the last year of Uncle Bruce’s Yuletide visits, but it was the first year that Uncle Bruce’s devotion to skiing crossed with my nascent interest in the sport . . . . . . When Dad was a kid, he had owned a pair of …

JULY 16, 2023 – As is the case with many geographically-challenged people outside of New England, when I was a kid, I had trouble remembering which of the two states sandwiched between Maine and New York was Vermont and which was New Hampshire.  For the record, my self-developed mnemonic device was to think of the …

July 15, 2023 -(Cont.) After his appearance at the World’s Fair, we learned, Uncle Bruce traveled to Scandinavia and the United Kingdom.  He sent post-cards to my sisters and me, and I regarded these as crown jewels within my collection of things.  One of the post-cards, I remember, was quite large and doubled as a …

JULY 14, 2023 – The old terminal at the Minneapolis airport was a small, quaint foreshadowing of the current  sprawling Minneapolis-St. Paul Lindbergh International Terminal.  However, for me as a young kid, the original, three-story brick building with a windy observation deck on a portion of the second floor roof and the green-glass control tower …

JULY 13, 2023 – (Cont.) I remember especially well the Christmas when I was five. I’d begged Mother to allow me to stay up until Uncle Bruce returned from his day of shopping in downtown Minneapolis, but he was unusually late, and Mother finally insisted that I go to bed. She promised that when Uncle …

JULY 12, 2023 – We knew him as Santa Claus, and indeed he was.  As reliable as the calendar, Uncle Bruce would arrive a week before the Big Day.  He always caught a night flight from Newark to the old terminal in Minneapolis, where Mother and Dad would pick him up.  His arrival was past …

JULY 11, 2023 – (Cont.) Grandpa died at 92. He’d been ailing for four years after he failed to negotiate an unusually high curb on his way to the post office on the other side of Lincoln Park in Rutherford.  He fell and struck his head on the pavement.  Grandpa fought back valiantly, but he …

JULY 10, 2023 – (Cont.) Back there in the dining room as I found it in 1980, I didn’t realize the full extent of the iceberg that had upset my perception of Grandpa. After all, what did I know? I was but the inexperienced grandson with a liberal arts education from a fancy school but …

JULY 9, 2023 – (Cont.) Not long after that, Gaga and I agreed on the next cleanup target: the dining room, which Grandpa had long ago commandeered as his evening office.  Back in those days, no one—not even UB or Mother when she visited—questioned what it was that Grandpa was doing in there every evening …

July 8, 2023 – (Cont.) Feeling confident, I asked Gaga, “So, what do you think about my tackling all the junk in the driveway along the side of the house?” “Go right ahead!” she said.  “For years I’ve been waiting for someone to get rid of it all, but no one listens to me.” In the …

JULY 7, 2023 – (Cont.) There was nothing more emblematic of the long history of the Holman business than a petrified banana that Grandpa had found one day in the drawer of a dresser, which had been abandoned close to 75 years earlier—and which Grandpa was only then in 1980 getting around to moving out …

JULY 6, 2023 -(Cont.) By this time (autumn, 1980) in the course of my evolving inheritance, Mother had been making regular trips back East.  The stated reason was to “give [UB] some relief in caring for Gaga and Grandpa,” but in truth she was on a major guilt trip for having left her family and …

JULY 5, 2023 – (Cont.) The other memorable example of Grandpa’s utter unflappability came about a month later (see 7/3 post). By that stage of Grandpa’s life, his business was a faint shadow of its former significance. In reality it had been reduced to hobby status, a familiar diversion for a man who had known …

JULY 3, 2023 – (Cont.) In a way, I felt sorry for Grandpa.  Despite being an organization man, he didn’t have any what I’d call personal friends—people in whom he could confide on a personal, not just business level—but perhaps that was a more general characteristic of his generation.  Yet even within the family he …

JULY 2, 2023 – Except for Mother, who called Grandpa “Dad,” and my three sisters and I, who called Grandpa, “Grandpa,” the rest of the world (including Gaga) called Grandpa, “Griz”—short for Griswold—or “Mr. Holman.”  I never heard UB call him anything except “Grandpa,” and that was only when UB was talking about him. Gaga …

JULY 1, 2023 – (Cont.) My thoughts returned to the moment at hand as the driver pulled up to a bus stop.  “Here you go,” he said.  “You just cross here and climb the hill and on your left you’ll find the hospital.” Soon I was inside the place.  A short time later, I reminded …

JUNE 30, 2023 – Blogger’s note: A loyal follower of this series who knows “more of the story” about my mother expressed surprise and curiosity as to why PART I: MOTHER didn’t reveal the full story, as it were. My response was, “Stay tuned!” The structure of INHERITANCE introduces Mother’s family via representative, anecdotal impressions, …

JUNE 29, 2023 – (Cont.) Gaga was kind and generous, and she displayed these attributes best at Christmas time.  A good two weeks before the big day, a large box would arrive bearing a shipping label with Grandpa’s company name and logo—a moving van. Inside the package were a dozen or more wrapped gifts for …

JUNE 27, 2023 – (Cont.) I always wondered what this prejudiced woman thought of Kristina marrying a Jew.  Gaga never said a word about the fact that he was Jewish, and accepted him as if he were one of her own. I never had to wonder, however, what Gaga thought about Dad’s ethnic background.  The …

JUNE 26, 2023 – (Cont.) Gaga was quite a reader, but she kept to the genre of old-fashioned mysteries.  She’d send UB on regular expeditions to the public library, and he’d go to the mystery section and pull two or three books off the shelf on each visit.  Gaga’s system for avoiding repeats was to …