When Grampa Drank and Spanked

This is my last day to waste philosophizing and thinking about the way things might have been, since tomorrow my mind will be occupied full-time with first grade and meditating on the eternal truths of addition, subtraction, decimals and fractions. Although I never met my grampa, I was just thinking he must have been something, to have had half a dozen great kids like my aunt, uncles, and Daddy. Of course, he had a few beers sometimes and smacked Daddy once or twice with his belt when little Uncle Tom cried, but isn't that an admirable quality, to defend the weak, defenseless little brothers of the world? I'm sure his life would have been better if he had lived long enough to know me. I could have taken him to Burger King for a Whopper, and Century 20 to see the Clash of the Titans. He would have helped me cheer on the Cardinals against the Giants, and taken me to Alcatraz and to ride on the cablecar. He would have helped me learn Latin, but I'd still have trouble with some of the dinosaur names, since they also derive from Greek. Triceratops, for example, comes from "tri-" (Latin for 3), "cerat-" (Greek for horn), and "ops" (Greek for "face gives the name for"). Daddy still remembers his first day of first grade at All Saints, when he entered the big kid entrance with the stampeding second thru eighth graders, instead of the quiet, orderly entrance reserved for the little first graders. Good that he lived to tell about it, but as I'm sure Grampa would say if he were still alive, "omnia in bonum" (Latin for "all things work together unto good for those that love God" - St. Paul, Rom 8:28).