I spent many summer days helping my grandfather on his Nebraska farm.
“Helping” is generous. I was under 10 years old and couldn’t carry or heft much, fix, weld or drive anything – or complete any task without supervision. But I enjoyed my days with Grandpa. I think he enjoyed shepherding his unhelpful helper.
Many days, around mid-morning, Grandpa drove us six miles to town in his Dodge pickup along dusty gravel roads.
Our destination? The Parkland Cafe, where we joined a table of farmers and businessmen.
The grownups drank coffee and chatted. I sipped hot chocolate, said little and comprehended less. But I felt proud sitting with the grownups.
Time never rests. I’m older today than my grandfather was then.
Yet memories live on, and one that has preoccupied me recently is of those long-ago coffee gatherings.
I join coffee groups myself now, sometimes five mornings each week. And I’ve learned what Grandpa surely knew: it’s the people, not the coffee, that draw us together.
Grandpa died in 2005 at age 95. I’d sure like to invite him to coffee.
More Childhood Memories
My Childhood Crush on Scrooge McDuck
Wasted and Well-Spent Saturdays
Picking up hay in the summer heat on the farm in northwest Missouri was the hardest.
Steve, that sounds prickly.
Lovely memory; lovely little film, Jeff.
Thank you, Darlene.
This is very beautiful. My Granddaddy (that’s what we called him) was a huge influence on me, but I never got to go to coffee with him — or the beloved pool room he visited every Saturday night while I helped my Mammaw make Sunday dinner for 10 or 12 of us. But I did help on the farm, help being a pejorative term. When I was about 10, I started driving the tractor for the gathering of hay bales. We won’t discuss my escapade that left a mangled fence in my wake — or the laughs and undying pokes from my Granddaddy. He has been gone for nearly 40 years, and I still miss him. Thanks for sharing this.
We won’t discuss my escapade when I was 19 and mowing my grandparents’ big yard with John Deere riding lawnmower that I temporarily lost control and mowed my grandma’s green bean plants. Not a word of that escapade shall be spoken.