Call me 'puskahosu', will you?

I got kind of curious after writing the entry about my grandads funeral, so I went a-roaming on the World Wide Web. And check out what I found...grandad was IOOF!!

International Order of Odd Fellows, that is. Sort of a Catholics and workingmans' budget version of the Masonic Lodge. Their main thing was disaster relief funds for their members and burial insurance; kind of like the Grange* does. Of course, the Grange is also a quasi-Masonic thingie; a rural one. Those darned old quasi-Masonic thingies, them.
Anywho, thats how grandad rated the funeral from Verdi!

Grandad was a guy who never learned English-or so he'd have you believe- a drunk, a wife beater and a pig, who worked in the woods for months at a time. Rather than suffer the disgrace of putting his son out to neibors, because that would be asking for charity, left him instead in an orphanage. Although to hear it told it sounded more like one of those lockers in the bus station. He'd drop off my father and then come back around when the mood lead him and 'redeem' him.
And did this repeatedly.
And sometimes forgot him there for years at a time.
Reflect: this was not the orphanage out of 'Annie'. This was something out of Dickens, if Dickens had been into child porn.

My memories of my grandfather consist of him being old, drinking coffee out of a saucer, drinking Old Crow hot with spoon of sugar, dropping his upper plate to freak me out (and you'd freak too... old man spit googling around in a toothlss pink maw is not pretty), and either smacking me or tripping me with his cane whenever I came into reach.


I would like to express here my sincere gratitude to the International Order of Odd Fellows for giving me such a vivid and lasting memory of this vicious mans' demise.
And for encasing him in not one, not two, but three separate containers-a steel casket, a steel vault and a cement enrobement.

That oughta hold him.



*I was actually SCOUTED by the Grange. I seriously was. They wanted me to join but I balked at the whole 'beer stein full of piss' thing. Thats' not clean.