(This is an amendment to my earlier writings about my experience in Ohio and my description of the Wysong worldview.)
Nanny & Pa
My mom’s parents were Kathryn “Kathy” Ida Phillips, and Ralph Edward Wysong.
We called Ralph, “Pa”, and the brevity of this title matched his personality just as well as its endearing, Midwest overtones. Kathy, on the other hand, fought her whole life to be called “Nana”, but the grandkids’ early mispronunciation stuck, so we only ever referred to her as “Nanny”.
In contrast to my Coller grandparents in Iowa, Nanny and Pa seemed to value extravagance over consistency, and adventure over security. Not that they could afford half the things the Coller grandparents could have, but they made the most of what they had, and spoiled us kids just as hard as they could. They seemed a perfect yin, to the Coller yang. Any pain or loss was treated with distraction, and the highest priority was protecting the happiness of the grandkids.
Nanny worked part time as a teacher’s aid, and Pa, a bus driver, though I never remember visiting their schools nor do I recall them going or coming from work; only hearing that they had recently been at their phantom jobs. It only recently occurred to me that we always visited in the summer or Christmas, when school wasn’t in session.
By the time I came along, they were also volunteer chaplains at a local hospital, where they visited the sick and conducted services in the hospital’s chapel. I guess having a non-denominational chapel built right into the hospital is a common thing in America, but I think theirs was the only one I visited, or even knew existed.
Nanny and Pa would have me play hymns on my saxophone during their Sunday morning chapels when I visited, and afterward, we would eat at the hospital cafeteria. Nanny was always more excited about me being excited about the cafeteria than I actually was, but I enjoyed watching her enjoy watching me enjoy the cafeteria. She was pretty cute when she thought I was being cute.
Nanny
Born on November 9th, 1935, Nanny was living proof you can take the girl out of Tennessee, but you can’t take the Tennessee out of the girl. I know the state of Ohio is considered the “Mid-west”, but when you were on her property, you were as much in the South as anywhere you could point to on any map.
Nanny was one of nearly a dozen children, just like her mom had been, but she and both of her kids only had two kids.
I always thought I was Nanny’s favorite. (I would later learn that my older brother was her favorite, but it’s entirely possible that her favorite changed, depending on who was showering her with the most attention.) Nanny always thought I looked like movie stars: Ralph Machio from the Karate Kid, then the boy from Boy Meets World, and then, the highest compliment Nanny could pay anyone – she was absolutely convinced I was a doppelganger for John F. Kennedy Jr.
Yes, Nanny – I look exactly like all three of those male models who look nothing alike. It’s great to have at least one biased fan in your corner.
Pa
Born November 24, 1934, almost exactly a year before Nanny, Pa was born, bred, and also died within a few mile radius. His whole life he lived on the same property as his parents had, just like his descendants do now. He worked his whole life in the same family business his dad set up, fixing tractors, just like his son does now.
I never heard him gossip. I never heard him complain. In fact, I rarely heard him say anything, except, “I love you”. A thick 6′ 3″ of solid snuggles, he was the absolute unit of quiet consistency and diligence.
Despite my mom’s corroborated tales of receiving corporal welts at the hands of her father, the closest I ever saw him to irritated with me was whenever I was rifling through his pantry or fridge and he’d inquire with his booming voice, “Whatcha huntin’?” to help me satisfy my appetite less chaotically.
The Shop
To this day, I don’t know the name of the business. I assume it had an official name, but we always just called it “the shop”. (Despite the lack of a web presence, the internet seems to just call it “Wysong Tractor Service“.) The shop was situated on their property about 20 yards from their house, so Pa’s commute never got in the way of taking a short lunch break at home, or making it back for dinner.
The shop was perpetually full, a hub of almanac predictions and amateur mechanic diagnoses, like the farmer’s version of the barber shop. Most people who brought their tractors in for repair liked to wax authoritative about how to get the machine operational again, but it always seemed to me that if they were the pros they imagined, they would not have had to bring it to the Wysongs.
Multiple times a day, I’d wander into the shop, as sparks flew from the grinder, and the growl of the compressor intermittently forced the patrons to shout. There was always a recently-fixed tractor in need of a test drive, and Pa never hesitated to let me join him and help with the steering.
We called Pa’s dad “Old Pa”. He was too old to work on the tractors any more, but he put in full day, every day, sittin’ in his chair – Old Pa’s chair – and chatting up the customers next to the fridge that must have been there since the 50’s and held the 60-cent cans of Pepsi that I swear, somehow tasted better in that shop than any Pepsi anywhere else on the planet. Maybe it was the way the taste mixed with the smell of grease and gasoline, but something about any part of that combo never fails to teleport me back to the shop, and I can’t wait for Pa to get off work so I can curl up on his lap before he changes out of his dark-blue, grease-stained coveralls and we can fall asleep together to a John Wayne movie, while Nanny toils away in the background, filling our nostrils with the promise of a home-cooked dinner.
Solo Summers
If you ever heard Ryan or me talk about Ohio, we were probably referencing our solo summer adventures. Every year, my brother and I would take turns spending our summer soaking in all the spoiling that Nanny could concoct.
But I have memories of more summers than I have summers I’ve lived, so somewhere amidst those summers, the humid Ohio air and tornado-y thunderstorms worked their time-warping magic. In reality, I think we probably took turns spending a few weeks alone, then whoever was left behind would be taken to join them for a few additional weeks. However it happened, Ohio was home to about 17 of my greatest summers before age 10.
We started the tradition as early as I can remember, so several years it was a pretty traumatic event to leave my parents, and my protests of having to leave my family to go to Ohio were only matched by my protests when it was time to leave Ohio to go back home.
In the earliest years, Nanny accompanied Pa to Iowa to pick me up, and brought new gifts like a plastic collapsing giraffe or my dog puppet, Samuel, to help make the handoff smoother. But after a few years, Pa chauffeured us by himself, while Nanny prepared for our arrival with a fresh pot of her chicken pot pie soup.
About half way between Boone, Iowa and Brookville, Ohio lies the city of Peoria, Illinois, whose McDonalds play place served as the transfer point where my dad would drop off whichever kid was taking their turn.
Hopping into Pa’s carpeted van in Peoria, the sensation of liberation was instantaneous! Seatbelts were not required, unless I was sitting in the faux-leather captain’s chairs, pretending to be king of the world. The back bench seat boasted a large, round card table where I could play games or eat food (something never allowed in our family vehicles). And if I took the table out of the post hole, there was a quarter-sized hole where I could see straight down to the asphalt, flying past below. This was fun to watch on its own, but with a sufficiently full bladder, any boy could also intuit the purpose of the nearby funnel, painting a temporary yellow line down the middle of the lane.
Upon arriving at the house, I would rush up their short, windy walkway and push open the front door, eager to inhale my first lung-full of Nanny-and-Pa’s-house air, a fragrance so indescribably soothing, that when they occasionally sent us packages in Iowa, Ryan and I would fight over who got to smell the inside of the box first when we opened it.
As I walked through the door, Nanny would be standing next to the chicken pot pie on the stove, sporting her do rag and her genuine enthusiasm. After several hugs and kisses, I would take my first steaming bowl of the magical treat into the living room and turn the TV to any station I wanted, in any seat, except for Pa’s chair. Vacation had officially started. I was king of the world for the next several weeks, and Nanny, my personal chef.
My brother and I shared a room until age 12, so our solo summers in Ohio were the only time we had our very own bedroom. Nanny and Pa’s spare room was my mom’s old room, and I’m pretty sure the dresser and enormous queen bed were original. I know the artwork was:
But in my very early years there, I slept in Nanny and Pa’s bedroom, in the crib that Pa slept in as a baby. In a game I’m sure was invented to distract my mind and prevent nighttime homesick tears, Pa would race me to sleep when it was suddenly time for bed. Sprinting down the hall and into their room, I could use the side bars to help catapult my body over the side, landing my back on the miniature mattress like the worlds tiniest, sleepiest pole vaulter.
Once in bed, I was further distracted by their tv that stayed on, and tuned to Christian programming or the weather channel until I fell asleep. I didn’t care that the shows were boring. I could actually see the screen here, as opposed to the conglomerated change of lights from Quincy and Newhart that streamed through my parents barely open bedroom door at home.
TV and Movies
Day two as king of the world found me with the TV guide in my lap and a highlighter in my hand.
(TV Guide was a short, thick magazine that listed all the shows that would be on all the channels at all the times that month. People paid to be subscribed to it because there wasn’t any other way to know what was going to be on, unless you memorized the recurring day and time of your favorite show. For all of us who did not have a TV Guide, we would do something called “channel surfing”, where, preferably within the first minute or two of the top or bottom of the hour, when all the channels were starting a new episode, we would quickly change to the next channel as soon as we could tell what show was on that channel, like Hamm in Toy Story, and keep track mentally of whichever channel had the show that we most wanted to watch out of all the quick snippets we had just seen. So we often missed the first minute or two of our favorite shows. This may be why shows tended to have longer intro theme songs back then, giving us a chance to surf through all the channels and easily recognize what was on, before coming back, without missing much of the actual show. And there was no other way to watch the show unless you had done the prep work to record it on a VHS, which was like a DVD that slowly disintegrated each time you watched it and lacked the ability to skip around. How you’re going to explain a DVD to your kids, I have no idea.)
When there wasn’t a show I wanted to watch (and with a limited number of channels, that was still the majority of the day), that would be my play time. And when I found two shows I wanted to watch at the same time, Pa had one of the fancy VCRs where you could record a show on one channel while you watched a show on a different channel. Most summers I would take home an extra VHS or two of shows and movies I had collected during my stay, including several episodes of the original Little Rascals and Joey D’Auria as the only real Bozo the Clown.
True to form, my grandparents ordered the Disney channel just when we were visiting. (This put them in a whole other level of privilege in my mind, since they were the only people I ever knew to have access to this programming.) This is what filled up my VHS tapes most quickly, as the Disney Channel featured the somewhat-recent movies you’ve never heard of, that are now “Disney Vault Classics”, like 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Swiss Family Robinson, Davy Crocket, The Gnome-Mobile, and Babes in Toyland.
Nanny’s house is also the only place I recall going to the theater before we moved to California.
Despite the Boone movie house being located just blocks from our house, our first theater experience was with Nanny at the 1984 re-release of the original Pete’s Dragon. We would later see all of the Benji movies when they were released, as well as any Ernest or Karate Kid movies that lined up with our visits.
Pantry
At home, Dad was in charge of breakfast, which meant we were in charge of breakfast. It was our most autonomous meal, the only meal with options, and not served on our segmented Melmac plates. Our options were:
- Grape nuts (with New York syrup from Auntie, if dad was up to help us pour),
- shredded wheat (the non-frosted bricks that I don’t think they even sell in the cereal aisle anymore, but might be available at your local cattle feed depot, wherever they haven’t been banned for the havoc they wreak on the inside of a mouth…should have been called shredding wheat…gotta let them soak in that milk for a little while first), or
- Jiffy blueberry muffins, if we had the ingredients.
The order of desirability should be obvious. We ate a lot of muffins.
But in Ohio, Nanny had a pantry, filled with every abominable carbohydrate sold with any cartoon mascot on the front. Frosted Flakes, Pop Tarts, Fruit Roll-ups, Fruit Gushers, and pretty much any other sucrose-laden “snack” with the lie of “fruit” or “granola” in the title. She even bought the Goobers peanut butter that had jelly mixed right in. The debauchery!
The fridge, freezer, and deep freezer were likewise packed with unwise choices. Flintstones Push-ups, Squeeze-Its and the Koolaid Burst with the plastic twist-off tops, and every kind of frozen desert sandwich or [soda] pop I could request.
And the most requested pop? The taste which is the only rival in nostalgic senses to the smell of their home? To this day, only available in that part of the country: Barq’s Red Cream Soda, which lined the inside of the Wysong refrigerator door whenever a Coller was in town.
Then, just a few days into the trip, the two of them would take me to the immense, Super-Walmart-esque store, Meijer’s, and I treated the trip like my own personal round of Supermarket Sweep, loading the grocery cart with whatever treat or trinket caught my eye. I don’t remember ever being rebuffed (though they could have returned nearly all the items when my back was turned and I never would have known, because the house was already full of more more treats than a single boy could devour in a summer).
Just as I had a hard time controlling my bladder at night until I was quite old, I had a surprisingly difficult time with the other side during the day. Not so much in public, but when I had home court advantage and was thoroughly engaged in my play time, I tried to wait until the very last second, often overestimating by a second or two.
Now as a parent, I have a lot of compassion for conundrums like these. If my parents were like most parents (perhaps a poor assumption), they would have fretted over such problems with a perplexing combination of intensity and forget-ability:
Is this normal? Is this weird? If I address it directly, am I going to make it worse? Is this a phase?…or a pathology? Does he need an incentive?…or a diagnosis?
And then, over time, it just goes away, and if you remember it at all, you attribute the “cure” to whatever it was you tried last. Parents are weird.
None of that mattered to Nanny. The solution would be the same, no matter the cause: more pooping-themed treats! On the incentive side, she stocked chocolate wafer bars called “Tookies” to reward each of my dookies. Then, on the treatment side, she kept huge ziplock bags of blueberries in the deep freezer, which she served to me by the bowlful, sprinkled with several Equal packets. Throw in the raspberry and chocolate Fi-bar meal replacement high-fiber bars between meals, and, unsurprisingly, my incontinence problems nearly vanished when I stayed with Nanny.
Pets
Nanny and Pa had a formerly-active chicken coop they used for storage as long as I knew them, so the phrase “in the chicken coop” was somewhat akin to “in the attic” in my mind. Years later, as an adult, when my friend told me he was building a chicken coop, I responded, “Cool! What are you going to use it for?” He didn’t say a word, and I’m hoping the amount of time he thought I was being an ass covered the amount of time it took me to have my epiphany, so we could meet cleanly on the other side, in a, “…just kidding.”
My mom also recalls growing up “on a pig farm,” but I’m guessing that means “farmland that had one or more pigs,” because neither of my grandparents could recall being pig farmers. Likewise, in her sermons about how the Bible says we’re like sheep, my mom recalls how much more filthy, disgusting and smelly the sheep were than the pigs (probably more repulsive than all the other animals, with just underscores how great Jesus is, that he could find some way to love even us reprehensible human beings!). I could not get my grandparents to admit to being former Ohio shepherds either. But even though I don’t know what animals they did have, I think it’s safe to assume there used to be more of them on the property than I ever experienced.
By the time my memories were being formed, “Red” was the chained-up German guard mutt for the house, alerting us of anyone approaching the driveway. Husky mix “Thor” provided the same service for the shop. Those two semi-circles of alarm were the only territory forbidden to the grandkids. I was always shocked that Nanny could walk right up to them and feed them without being torn to shreds. I did not have her magical powers, so I feared them exactly like the Sandlot kids feared Beast.
In addition to the security dogs, Ryan and I seemed to acquire a new pet each year. Showing up pet-less, I looked for a suitable temporary mate in the classified ads within the first few days, saddling my grandparents with a years-long responsibility for the pleasure of having one more plaything for my few-weeks stay. The only names I remember are Mandy and Sparky, but the lore and the pictures keep record of many more unnamed dogs.
Somehow, each year we returned, the previous year’s pet had “run away” and we needed to get a new one. I do not know – nor do I want to know – how that coincidence kept taking place, despite Thor and Red’s inability to plot such an escape.
We also frequently had barn cats: cats whose origins are as mysterious as spiders in the attic, who give birth in the barn, and then come and go as they please. None of these were officially “pets”, but I enjoyed caring for them all the same, attempting to nurse to health many who were not born with a fighting chance. I was not always successful.
In the country, animals that experienced more incurable misery than joy are often graciously freed from their misery, in the least painful way possible. Unfortunately, history has taught us that the least-painful ways to die are often the least-palatable. As one example, the guillotine was presented by a French physician and humanitarian to reduce the suffering of capital punishment, which it did, for the would-be victims. Sadly, it only displaced the suffering onto the spectators of the jarring decapitation.
Similarly, a well-placed bullet to the head is probably as quick an end to life as any, but well-placing your own bullet on your own head is surprisingly difficult, and often ends in injury rather than death. So assigning the task to someone else is more dependable, and more humane…for the formerly-alive. But the sanctioned assailant might experience a night terror or two. So, one of the purposes behind the firing squad was an attempt to alleviate the impact on the still-alive, allowing each participant to think, “Maybe it wasn’t my bullet that did them in.”
But once again, the thing which is most humane ends up looking the most un-human, proven by the fact that the guillotine and the firing squad still have the reputation of being some of the most barbaric executions in civilized history, despite the fact that, barring a catastrophic aneurism in my sleep, these are some of the least painful ways I think I could exit life.
That brings us to Thor. Thor had entered the stage of life where death was preferable. His eyes didn’t work. His ears didn’t work. His bowels didn’t work. His legs barely worked, and only part of the time. He couldn’t eat solid food, the only part that was operational was his heart, which seemed to heartlessly pump him through a life he could barely perceive he was living.
I don’t know whose idea it was, but someone decided it was time my brother and I experience farmland mercy. After loading Thor up on a truck and driving him to the back of the property, where a hole had already been dug for him, he was unloaded into his soon-to-be grave, where he had no hope of doing anything but sitting and looking up through his one, slightly-less-cloudy eye.
With my brother and dad by my side, fingers in our ears, my grandpa loaded his rifle, and, at point blank range, freed the dog, who had spent so many years as a loyal watchdog, from his suffering.
I don’t know if this next part is true, or if I’ve created the memory out of the exaggerated stories Ryan and I told in the following years. But whether it happened or not, I have the memory of blood splattering at the back of the grave, and Thor looking up with a surprisingly unchanged expression, but a whimpered howl escaping his lips before Pa quickly reloaded and fired the bullet that left the faithful guard dog limp and lifeless.
I don’t think there’s a moral to the story. I don’t remember if we helped bury him, though I think we did, and then shared in the solemn honor from the women in the house, who knew what had to be done, and were grateful there were men like us around, so they didn’t have to do it themselves.
I may have been 16. I’m pretty sure I was 8.