Bronis Fitzpatrick & Viola Dishman
My grandmothers: Bronis Fitzpatrick and Viola Dishman in 1968 at Disneyland.
Bronis S. Fitzpatrick, nee Reid, was my grandmother, my father's mother. I was lucky enough to have her as a real presence in my life through out my childhood. My younger sisters were not so lucky. Now, trying to recall enough about her to give people a real sense of who she was, I find that I remember not facts and figures but impressions and personality.
She loved to read and she encouraged me to read and to love books. She bought the encyclopedia we had in our house when I was a child and I had read every volume by the time I left home at eighteen. She worked for the Reader's Digest and we always received the Reader's Digest Condensed Books from the time I was eleven or twelve -- that gave me four or five new books to read every month, bookworm heaven! Once she bought me an entire set of Mark Twain first editions at an auction. I read every one. I probably read "Tom Sawyer" and "Huck Finn" half a dozen times each, but I also read "Joan of Arc" and "A Tramp Abroad" several times. She also taught me to work crossword puzzles. I still think about her every time I fill in the word "peruse" for "to read".
My grandmothers, all three of them, were my favorite people as a child. I say three because I had my mother's mother, Viola Dishman (our "Grandma in California"), my father's mother, Bronis Fitzpatrick (our "Grandma in New York", later "Grandma in Mississippi") and Bronis' sister, Inez Walsh (our Aunt Ned). Aunt Ned was as much my grandma as my grandmothers were. Once when she took me on a trip to New York to buy fabric and other items for her fabric shop she introduced me to everyone as one of her second set of grandchildren. Aunt Ned's husband, Uncle John, filled in very nicely for the grandfathers I didn't know. Going to see Grandma, whether in California, New York or Mississippi, was always a great event.
Grandma could get real excited. She had a redhead's temper even though she had white hair as long as I knew her. My little brother took the brunt of that -- then he got bigger and figured out he could run faster than she could. I remember we were visiting them in New York on the day of the "Great Blackout" (the one in 1965, not the later one). Uncle John was down in the basement doing something -- working with his ham radios or fixing a TV, I think. Then all the lights went out and Grandma was yelling, "John, what did you do now?" Then she looked out the window, saw that ALL the lights were out and really started to let him have it. That turned out to be a fun evening, by the way. Aunt Ned and Grandma cooked spaghetti on some gadget Uncle John contrived and since there was no TV or anything the grown-ups all sat around and talked and I sat and listened and tried to read a book with a flashlight. Grandma kept telling me I was going to ruin my eyes (believe me, it wasn't the only time I read a book with a flashlight!).
Another time I remember her getting real excited was the time my Uncle Mike scared the you-know-what out of me and my sister, Roberta. Roberta and I weren't very old, in fact when I told Uncle Mike I was putting this in here he said he was surprised I even remembered the incident. Uncle Mike had gotten hold of some copies of these old monster movies (Frankenstein with Boris Karloff was one of them, I think -- I know I had nightmares about him chasing me) and shown them on the movie projector. Anyway, when we went upstairs to go to bed, he hid under the bed and after the lights went out, he stuck his hand up and touched us. We screamed bloody murder and then Grandma tore into him. I'm sure I remember it so clearly because if it happened today, they'd probably end up taking me to a shrink -- I couldn't sleep with by back to the open edge of a bed until I was a teen-ager!
I only remember Grandma getting mad at me once. I was almost seventeen and she just wouldn't talk to me. It upset me terribly. I remember sitting out on the front step of Aunt Ned's house in Mississippi and trying to figure out exactly what I'd done to make her so mad and what I could do to get her to forgive me. Aunt Ned came out and told me not to worry about it, Grandma got angry at her all the time and she'd get over it. She did. A day or so later, she just started talking to me again and never mentioned it again.
Once when Grandma was staying at our house, she almost killed my cat and I was almost as afraid that Grandma was going to have a heart attack as I was of losing the cat. Beauregard (isn't that a good Southern name?) was a big part-Siamese tom cat who had a really bad habit of sleeping in the clothes dryer. One morning Grandma went out in the garage to do some laundry and all at once she started screaming, "Patty, Patty, your cat is in the dryer! Oh, I know I've killed him! Patty! Patty!" I ran out in the garage and Grandma was standing in front of the dryer, which was still running -- Grandma was too upset to think to turn it off. I turned the dryer off and opened the door. It was full of bed sheets, Beau was totally wrapped up in them and I couldn't find him. I grabbed the whole pile of sheets and ran outside (don't ask me why, maybe the living room floor was occupied) and unwrapped him. He was lying there with a dazed look on his face, you could almost see the cartoon stars rolling around his head, gasping for air. After a few minutes, he stopped gasping and tried to get up, but his hip was dislocated. He spent the weekend at the vet's (my mother told me on Monday that had she known how much it was going to cost, she would have had my father shoot him -- I think she was kidding), they set his hip and let him recuperate. He was fine by Monday, but to my knowledge he never got in the dryer again.
I joined the Army when I was eighteen and left home. Grandma was about the only one who didn't think it was a terrible idea, but she did offer to pay the difference between the cost of me going to college at the University of New Orleans and the University of Southern Mississippi. I told her getting away from home wasn't the only reason I was joining the Army, I just didn't know what I wanted to do when I "grew up". I enjoyed the Army and never regretted my decision to enlist (my decision to get out is another matter altogether). I married at nineteen and we went to Korea shortly after the birth of my older son. I saw my Grandma only sporadically after that. I talked to her on the phone quite frequently until we went to Korea. We wrote lots of letters both before we left the country and after. Grandma was a great correspondent. She wrote long, newsy letters -- I wish I still had them. I told my Aunt Ned after Grandma died that now I would never know what was going on at home because my mother never tells me anything.
Grandma died when I was twenty-three. I remember the phone rang one afternoon and I picked it up and no one said anything and then there was a dial tone. Right then I knew my Grandma was gone. I didn't want to pick up the phone when it rang again -- I let it ring two or three times. But I did pick it up and it was my mother with the news. While I was talking to her and trying to figure out in my head how I was going to get home, my Dad told her to tell me not to come home for the funeral because it cost too much. I was living in California at the time. After I hung up the phone I told my husband that my grandmother was dead and my Dad said not to come home. Then I started crying. I remember my three year old coming up to me and saying "Don't cry, Mommy" and my husband picking him up and taking him and his brother into the other room or outside. After about an hour I called my Aunt Ned and we had a long talk about Grandma and I felt a little better. But it has been eighteen years and I still miss her. I hope that where she is now she knows how much I loved her.
Written by Patricia Jones Dumond, 18 August 1999, at Hinesville, Georgia.