Grandpa Letter #6

Wednesday, November 18, 2015         10:03 a.m.

Provo Utah

My Dear Deisel;

Your mother tells me you’ve been getting better grades in school lately, but your teachers tell her you don’t work very hard. I can understand that completely. When I was in high school I was BORED OUT OF MY GOURD with every class except English and Theater, so I never tried very hard. I was so sick of school by the time I graduated from high school that I vowed I would never get any further education – ever. Lucky for me I was able to get into Clown College right away!

I have enclosed an old photograph I took years ago of your great grandma Ev’s angel cabinet. I know your mother likes angels, too, so you might want to show her the photo to earn a few brownie points . . .

I don’t know why my mother liked to collect angel statuettes. Maybe they reminded her of her own mother, Daisy, who really was a very gentle and loving soul – a real angel here on earth. Your aunt Daisy is named after her.

I never paid any attention to her angel collection until I moved in with her to take care of her during her final illness. She had congestive heart failure and the doctors told her she didn’t have long to live. Hah! She lived for almost 2 more years. She was a tough old bird.

As she began to approach the final dissolution, she would ask me to take the angel cabinet off the wall and bring it over to her in her chair or in her bed. Then she would stare at it for hours, sometimes talking to one of the angels, calling it by her sister Ruby’s name or calling it mother – telling the cold little statue that she would soon be joining it on the other side and asking that she please be there to greet her. She began talking to the angels every day, calling them by the names of her friends and family that had already died.

Except for my dad – she never talked to him when she talked to the ceramic angels. I don’t think she ever thought of him as angel material. (And unless they have a saloon in heaven I doubt very much he’s there myself!)

One day mom rallied enough to want to make a new will. So I drove her over to her lawyer’s office and she had a new will made that split everything she had 3 ways – one third to me, one third to my brother Billy, and one third to my sister Sue Ellen. My other sister, Linda, who had left home as soon as she graduated from high school and told mom she never wanted to see her again, was left completely out of the will – except for the angel cabinet. Mom specified that Linda should get that, and nothing more.

Well, Sue Ellen was fit to be tied. She wanted the angel cabinet, not because it was worth anything, but just because she didn’t want her sister Linda to get it. So, when we moved mom into a hospice center a few days before she died, Sue Ellen let herself into the apartment and took away the angel cabinet. When I asked about it she told me to shut up and mind my own business.

But I didn’t get mad, because a few weeks earlier mom had had me take all her silverware (which WAS worth something) and ship it out to Linda in Oregon. I never told Sue Ellen, and so when it came time to pass out poor old mom’s possessions the silverware was nowhere to be found. Sue Ellen was the executor of the estate, and she was foaming at the mouth about the missing silverware. I finally told her what I had done with it, and she tried to have me arrested for theft. When that didn’t work she managed to get a court order disbarring me from receiving anything from my mother’s estate, and, instead, transferring it over to the Child Support people who were supposed to send it all to your Grandma Amy. I guess they did. At least, I never saw any of it.

That’s when I decided to go back to Thailand to spend the rest of my life – I felt very disgusted with my own family and with the USA in general.

I’d still be in Thailand today, except when my passport expired the Child Support people stepped in again and wouldn’t let me get a new one, so I had to come home.

But after all these years, I’m not bitter anymore about any of it. I’m glad I could take care of my mother; I’m glad my sister Linda got something to remember mom by; I’m glad I got to go back to Thailand; and I’m glad I had to come back and get my life in order so I could go back to the Temple again. I go every Tuesday now, and am enjoying myself immensely!  Just remember, my boy – wickedness never was happiness, and it ain’t tax-deductible either!  

Yer pal,