William's Grandpa

[Dinero]

My sister forwarded this to me. It was written by her son, who lives in Washington and is getting married next Friday.

By the way, I don't think I ever beat Dad at horseshoes but he is one of the few I couldn't beat.





I remember living in Texas when I watched my grandfather playing horseshoes with my Uncles. The pins and pits were near an old, splintery gray-weathered wooden cedar rail fence in the back of my Aunt Patsy's yellow and brown bricked ranch-style house. They drank Lone Star beer under the sun and it always seemed to be during a family get-together.


Grandpa usually wore a thin plaid patterned snap button short sleeved shirt with two pokets over a ribbed tank top, a straw cowboy hat with a brown band around the rim and a thick tanned leather belt with "Jim" in black on the back of it that would barely hold up his pair of jeans that seemed to be the pre-cursor to the hip-hop style of sagging. His voice was always recognizable by the pitch of his voice from the Red Man chewing tobacco in his lower jaw and by his signature gargled high-pitched drawn out laugh when he was joking with someone. He never chewed his tobacco like you'd see in the movies or on T.V. but rather let it rest in his mouth to occassionally spit.


I gather my grandpa was semi-competetive playing games by the way he approached pitching horseshoes. It was always what I remember seeing him play in the Summer, unless it was too hot to go outside and then it was Spinner dominoes. It didn't matter which one it was, he knew how to play them both exceptionally well and very strategically to the point he could make the match close or put it away in a skunk. The score was usually unknown when he played horseshoes because I didn't know what was going on at the time or how to.


Watching him play was fun but I would constantly nag him to let me join in with him. He would yelp "Weeyooo" when he got a ringer and "Weeyum" at me to get out of the way when I would run from one pit to the other with my eyes constantly panning back and forth from him to the horseshoes in eagerness to play. He never played a real match against me but he would let me throw them as wildly as I wanted to every once in a while. He didn't lose often, from my limited view, but by the way he was always challenged by his sons all the time led me to beileve this. Maybe it was a Alpha male kind of call and response between father and son, or maybe it was in those moments each of them were thinking of how they'd look back on those matches as times they really enjoyed spending time with each other, or maybe they didn't care one way or the other and it was just to pass the time. All I know is that horseshoes and Granpa are synonymous to me

[MegaGlide]

Kids see stuff.

[ms_tapestry]

What a wonderful memory and what a gift his sharing of that memory is.

[DaSkip]

Thanks, Jim. That letter brought back some fond memories of my own.

[OKC Fatboy]

Thanks for sharing that, Jim. I wish I could have met him.