Sonny

I’m in a nostalgic mood about my pre-Florida life. I have a lot of wonderful memories that involved my grandmother. I don’t know why I’m thinking about them all of a sudden, but I am and I might as well get some blog posts out it. While she was very loving, she was not what anyone would call sweet. As I’ve gotten older I’ve broken my view of her life into two periods: before she lived alone and after she lived alone. She mellowed after she got her own place. She was a strange contradiction. She was an absolute control freak, especially when it came to controlling her daughters, but she was happiest when she lived alone. Maybe it was because she got a lot more space and independence without having to give up much control when she moved out of our house. It was in the mid-eighties so she could track her three daughters down, and before caller ID so they couldn’t easily avoid her calls. But she seems to be at the center of memories before then. I remember traveling with her to Pittsburgh to see my uncle’s family. She and I were travel buddies. We made the trip to Pittsburgh from Rockville by planes, trains, and automobiles all before I was ten. I loved going to my uncle’s house. He had all the cool stuff. He had a dark room to develop photos. He had firearms. He had a pre-Atari video game system with Pong and a skeet shooting game that was at least three generations before duck hunt. He also had a great dog, Rusty. I loved going to Pittsburgh, and I’m realizing this as I write it, because I saw people who looked like me. They still lived in Homewood when I was very little and then moved to Penn Hills. I lived in Fallsmead. There were maybe four black kids in my elementary school – not class, school. My uncle would take me with him while he did all kinds of exciting stuff. Looking back it was borderline stuff. It was a lot more retired hustla than gangsta s**t. He was younger then than I am now. My favorite times were when the whole family got together. I remember the last time was Thanksgiving 1980. The whole Graves clan, only my grandfather was missing. It was all about the stories. My older uncle, the one still living in Pittsburgh, has always told the best stories, which his three sisters and/or wife would then fact check. I was nine years old and was seized up on the floor sounding like a dolphin, that’s how hard I was laughing. What’s weird is that I was living a classic example of the African-American oral tradition. Books are written about it, but in an academic, anthropological way. My mom has mentioned wanting to chronicle the Graves experience. You got a year from your retirement, which was in March I think, and then I’m going to start pushing a little bit.