Stories my grandpa told.

My grandpa had a stroke in his mid 60s.
Over the next ten years he gradually had more and more strokes, until he barely knew who any of his closest family members were.
He eventually died of a massive stroke, right before my first deployment.
However, back around 1998 I think it was, when he was mostly recovered from his first stroke, aside from chronic exhaustion and some difficulty with balance, he visited my family.
I remember the afternoon, a hot summer day in California.
We didn't get to see our grandparents that much, so it was a special treat.
I was about 15 and had a new love of writing, and a new moleskine journal.
My grandpa decided to start sharing as many of his stories as he could, while I wrote, knowing that if he had more strokes, they could be lost forever.
He was a man of very few words.
Actually, hearing him string more than 3 words together was unusual.
So, although these stories seem extremely short, understand the type of man that he was, in addition to his medical condition.
The artwork is my own.

The Faceless Woman

My grandpa grew up in a dirt poor family in Arkansas.
When I say dirt poor, they lived in a house with dirt floors.
From what he described, it was a 3 room house: a common area and two bedrooms.
He and his 2 brothers all slept in the same bed.
His younger brother used to wake up in the middle of the night while the other two slept.
Each morning, he would tell my grandpa the same story: that in the middle of the night a woman with long hair would come into the room and watch them.
My grandpa assumed that his brother was talking about their mother, and thought nothing of it.
Eventually, his brother mentioned that this woman had no face.
When he asked his brother what he meant by no face, his brother said that the woman had no eyes, nose, or mouth: just perfectly flat skin.
Eventually his brother burned their house down.
My grandpa said that he was "playing" with a burlap sack in a fire outside and "accidentally" threw it onto the roof of the house.
Until writing this, I never considered that this might have been intentional: I just know that it made a lot more hardship for their family at the time.
I am not sure that my grandpa considered it an intentional act, either.
However, after he said that the faceless woman never visited again.

Perhaps Bigfoot

Once my grandpa was a grown man and had finished his time in the Navy, he married my grandma and they had 3 boys of their own.
Still living in Arkansas at the time, they were much better off than my grandpa had been in his own childhood, as my grandpa was a skilled machinist.
Each summer, they would load up the station wagon and drive out to visit family in California, where they would eventually move to permanently.
Apparently, they had so much luggage loaded into that station wagon that the boys had to climb in and lay on top of it because there was no seat space left.
At that time, California was far from the urban sprawl that it is today, although even today the state is still mostly open wild country.
When you get north of San Francisco, you enter dense forests of massive redwood trees, the largest trees on earth.
This redwood forest goes pretty much all the way to Canada, and cities get fewer and farther between until you hit central Oregon.
This is Bigfoot Country.
Bigfoot is supposed to be a "wild man" descended from man's primal ancestors, that never left the trees and evolved to be something else.
That loaded up station wagon stopped on one of those long empty stretches of road with nothing but towering trees on both sides of the road as far as you could see.
My uncle needed to pee.
He was about 5 years old and at that point no one in the family had ever heard of "bigfoot."
When he got back into the car, he told the rest of the family that he had seen a bear running on its hind legs.

I hope that you enjoyed these "folk stories."
I absolutely believe them to be true, because my grandpa was an honest man who had no reason at this stage in his life to be telling lies, and the stories are supported by other family members.
I myself have seen and experienced things which defy conventional wisdom.
It's a strange world that we live in.

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