I never knew my maternal grandfather, Hubert Schauf. He was out in a field on Lost Hill Farm, when a massive heart attack took his life in 1949, three years before I was born. The only confabulistic memory I have of my paternal grandfather, John A. McGlynn Sr., is based on a photograph of me as an 18-month brat wailing on his lap as he reclined in the oversized leather rocker in the living room at my parent’s home on the last day of June in 1954, the night before he was killed in a fall from the haymow of the barn at Edgewood, the McCarthy homestead where his wife, my grandmother, Mildred had been raised.
I can only imagine how dark that moment and the months that followed must have been for my grandmother. According to my oldest sister, Maureen, who was there at the time, shortly before the accident Grandpa had come into the house for a drink of water and when finding Grandma perched on a rickety footstool, trying to clean a high cupboard, he had lovingly warned her, “Watch yourself, Mate.”—He called her “mate,” from the Irish máthair.—“Be careful you don’t fall.”
JHM on the lap of his grandfather, John A. McGlynn, Sr.
“Don’t you worry, Pate, I’ll do just that,” she’d replied with a smile. And now, not a half hour later, the man she’d married and lived with for 44 years was gone. The life-partner with whom she’d raised five children and provided foster care for 20 more would no longer be telling her to be careful or chiding her on her ample waistline. As one, the couple had eked out a living during the Great Depression; together they had lived on tenterhooks during the years of World War II as, one after another, their first three sons entered the war theatre, one of whom, my father, went MIA and was presumed to be dead before, revenant-like, he reappeared.
JHM with his sisters and grandmothers on his birthday in 1954. Front row (l-r): Mary, JHM, Jane. Middle row: Kathleen, Maureen, Eileen. Back row: Alvina Schauf and Mildred McGlynn
By this time in 1954 the couple’s first four children –Molly, Tom, John Jr., and Harry – were all married and raising families of their own. Their last son, Joe, just out of the Air Force, was home for the summer to help put up all the hay that would be needed to feed the cattle in the winter months ahead but he would be leaving at summer’s end to begin pre-veterinary school. And now her husband was gone, leaving the weight of Edgewood on her shoulders alone. My father, who had taken over Glynnspring, the McGlynn homestead, from his parents in 1945, lived only a few miles away and was able to call on her almost daily but with him and Anna Marie, having six children to feed and clothe and another one on the way, he could provide no guaranteed long-term support.
A second photograph of me, taken on my birthday in October that year, shows me with my birthday cake, surrounded by my five older sisters and our grandmothers. Alvina, our maternal grandmother, has a broad smile on her face as she watches me about to blow out the two candles on my birthday cake but Mildred, eyes downward, has the sunken, hollowed-out look of a person in despair, one completely unlike the vibrant grandmother I remember from my more sentient years ahead.
Following the death of my grandfather, apparently, a rapid-action plan took place among my uncles and aunt. Because Grandma had never learned to drive, now that Grandpa was gone and with none of their children living at Edgewood, she would be seriously isolated with no easy way to shop for provisions, go to church, or visit the doctor. And then, there was the question of continued farm maintenance. Grandpa was killed in the middle of haying season; last son Joe could help until he began school in the Fall but this was no tenable solution to the fiendish situation Grandma was in.
In short, the five children decided that first-son Tom, whose farm, West Branch, he was renting at the time, would take over Edgewood and Grandma would move to Sheafor Acres, home of her daughter and son-in-law, Molly and Jay, where in a miraculously short amount of time they erected a small home for Grandma mere walking distance from their home. A light to illuminate the darkness enveloping Grandma began to glow. The Little House meant that Grandma could be both independent and in close proximity to her dependable daughter and the four Sheafor grandchildren.
Although this tale is close to its end, this is actually the point where the real story begins because it was there in the Little House that my grandmother conveyed to me an important life lesson.
Between 1955, when Grandma moved to the Little House, and her death in 1963, I’d spend one week during the summer and some days during the winter at the Little House. She and I shared a love for jigsaw puzzles and whenever I arrived at the Little House for a stay, a card table would have been set up in her living room with a 500-to-1000-piece puzzle on top of it.
One puzzle I remember putting together with Grandma was the depiction of a sylvan glen with a bright sky and colourful blooms in the upper portion of the puzzle and darkened areas of the secluded glen covering much of the lower third. As these dark areas were the most difficult to piece together, they were usually the last for us to work on. At times I would be in near exasperation as a I tried to match the dark pieces but Grandma would always tell me, “Keep going, Little John; one piece at a time and you will get there.” So, with her encouragement, I would persist and after we had succeeded in finding the proper place for each of the dark puzzle pieces and the puzzle was complete, it was then that the beauty of the puzzle’s upper section was all the more enhanced by the darkness at its base.
Recently, I read Kitchen Table Wisdom, an autobiographical work by Rachel Naomi Remen, a physician and specialist in the treatment of depression among cancer victims. In one chapter she revealed that as a child, she and her grandfather had worked on jigsaw puzzles but that she had disliked working on the dark sections of a puzzle until her grandfather explained that without the dark pieces in place, the bright sections would be incomplete. When reading that, I remembered the same implied advice Grandma had conveyed to me.
Being just a boy in the years I was blessed to know her, I was scarcely cognizant of the dark periods in her life, only the empathetic, kindly, and loving person that she was for me but whose strength of character, I now realized, had been forged not by a blissfully carefree existence but by the dark periods she had successfully endured.
Thanks to Joan Suyenaga for the inspiration.
John H. McGlynn
john_mcglynn@lontar.org