Meet The Ancestors: Grandpa Jones
My earliest memory of my father happened when I was about four years old. My family lived upstairs, above my grandparents, in a small home across from the local Catholic church. I remember sitting on the edge of the sofa, watching my father sleep next to me. My brother and I were eating an orange and we methodically put the orange seeds in my father’s ear. By the time he woke up, my father’s ear was over-flowing with discarded orange seeds. That event is significant for two reasons. It established that my father could sleep through anything and that he allowed us children tremendous leeway. Adults in my family have always claimed that the ability to sleep anywhere is the sign of a clear conscience. In my father’s case, that was certainly true.
I miss my father tremendously. He taught me to fully appreciate comic books, holidays, gardening, Alfred E. Newman, horse-racing and music. He was the only father I knew who could click his heels and wiggle his ears. Who would play Sousa marches on his trumpet on the Fourth of July and taps at night. The last piece of music I heard him play was Somewhere Over the Rainbow. I never heard him play so well, or so sweetly. That was in July. He died four months later, on Thanksgiving Day, 1996. He was the most honorable, kind, gentle man I’ve ever know.