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Over at my Grandma's where my dad lived while the divorce was starting it's three long year battle. My mom had already started to move on, going back to night school to get her Masters and dating a few men. Dad, well he was deeply in love with my mother and drooped deeper and deeper into an alcoholic daze that he never really came out of...
It was fun at the beginning of the night when my dad and Grandma and my Aunt Millie would listen to the early Polka shows on the radio and try to get us to learn how to polka.
Yea, like we wanted to Polka. Well, my little sister did cause she was about 4 and would stand on my Dad's toes. Me, well, I was already sullen, an Emo kid decades before The Cure hit the charts. Still, I remember twirling around once or twice with my 5'1" grandma. My older brother? He wanted no part of this and viewed anytime spent in that house as punishment. He was all ready falling into a spiral away from any part of our family.
But then came Lawrence Welk at 7:00 and that was my Grandma's show of shows. That was pure torture to me as I would be listening to the Doors, the Beatles, The Byrds and The Who, yea, the Monkees were in there too, during the week and then this... the Whitest stuff ever to appear on network TV...
Well, by that time, my dad would be deep into his second or maybe third quarts of Strohs, we would have eaten a big supper and my Aunt would have left.
Then, the Jackie Gleason Show. That was funny even to a ten or eleven year old kid. Crazy Guggenheim would do his drunk schtick with Jackie as the bartender and my dad would always say for a god damn drunk that Fontaine can sing...
And he did.
An incredibly sweet Irish Tenor that I can still hear if I listen close enough.
Then Carol Burnett and Mannix. By that time my dad would have wandered off to one of the dozens of taverns within walking distance to the house. Grandma would be sleeping with my little sister and I would then get my little night light to read my comic books by or just lay there and listen to the transistor radio way down low. I slept on a cot that was snuggled in between the dining room table and the bank of side windows in the dinning room. It was just my size and it really was a place for me to escape.
I would usually still be awake when my dad would stagger in sometime around 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, watching from the dark as he stumbled into the table, then the hutch, hit the door in the hall way and then fall back into his bed in the side bedroom. Loud snores would soon be coming.
You might guess I hated those days but they were special to me. For years I blotted them out but now as decades separate those times from these, I look back fondly at the half assed polka I did with my grandma and smile. There was the big pile of food she would make for us, comfort food like Stuffed Cabbage or Roast Pork and Sauerkraut and I even now understand my dad's deepening depression over losing the only woman he would ever love that he dealt with as many did back in those days; a lot of booze to try and blot away the numbness of depression.
They are all gone now, my sister far away even though she only lives a few miles up the road. My brother a shadow just like he was back then. All I have left are those memories of my Saturday nights in the late 60's...
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