In Memory of Grandma Rothfuss

I lost my first grandparent on October 10, 2000. I remember the date easily because, coincidentally, it was my other grandmother’s birthday.

We had just gotten our cat, Lucky, and my brother and I had spent the night camped out in our basement with our new cat. My maternal grandmother had called that night, like many other nights in the past month, to talk to my mother. I declined to talk to her. The next morning, we were awakened by my paternal grandparents, who explained that my other grandmother had been in a plane accident, and she had passed away.

It has been over 25 years since I lost my maternal grandmother, and this past month, I lost my paternal grandmother to natural causes.

I cannot remember the exact first memory of my paternal grandmother, though my memory may be influenced by the pictures I have recently scanned from when I was a baby.

Growing up as an Air Force brat meant living away from much of your family when you were younger. Grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles were occasional visits, not trips across town. I remember visits growing up, meeting them on summer vacations, trips to the Black Hills in South Dakota, and the visits we made while living in North Dakota. There were also times when my mom and dad would drop my brother and me off at their house during school breaks.

Those summers will probably live with me forever. I remember sleeping in their basement, which had the wood paneling of the 70s and a matching blue-and-green shag carpet. They kept their older tube television in the basement. When we were not running back and forth to the old Oswego Pool in Hastings, we would hook up our N64 or Super Nintendo and play games during those summer visits. The best part of our stay was on the weekends, when they would get us these delicious, gooey, monstrous cinnamon rolls from the OK Cafe.

After my father retired from the Air Force, we moved to his childhood home of Hastings, where my grandparents had lived since getting married in their teens. That opened up a new realm of visits with them. The memories that come to mind first are Nebraska football games.

If you lived in Nebraska between the 60s and early 00s, you knew those games were close to a religious experience. Bars showing the games would be packed, pizzerias would be overfilled with orders, and there would hardly be a soul not sitting in front of the television watching the game. Even the week leading up to the game was an experience in itself. School teachers would give candy to kids wearing Nebraska shirts on Friday, and extra credit to the student who picked the closest score. Local businesses would put their score predictions on the board, always in favor of the Big Red.

For us, it meant game days in my grandparents’ basement. Even though their kids and grandkids had nicer television sets, we all came to watch those games with them.

Each game day followed the same program. During the first half, there was soda and candy to snack on. At halftime, Papa Ray’s Pizza hamburger pizza was brought in. Then came popcorn made on the stove and served in brown grocery bags for the second half. After the game, there were card games, and a chance to discuss the game we had just watched.

Those memories will stay with me forever: the few special weekends throughout fall and winter when all college football games still seemed to happen on Saturdays. I will miss watching the games with my grandmother, who would pray for turnovers and touchdowns. I will miss when she would ask if there was a fumble because the television was so blurry we could not tell if the ball had popped loose. I will miss the popcorn in those brown paper bags, which ruined microwave popcorn for me for life. I will miss the card games, whether they happened after the game or during other visits unrelated to Nebraska games.

After leaving Hastings for college, I would call my grandparents almost every weekend, normally on Sundays. Because my grandfather is deaf, I spent most of that time talking to my grandmother. We would talk about everything: the weather, politics, family news, and, of course, Nebraska football.

She would end almost every call by saying that she enjoyed talking to us because she learned something new. Most of the time, that meant something I was learning during my college days, from my undergraduate studies to my master’s degree. She would also bring up anytime she had seen the place where we were living in the news, whether that was Lincoln, Delaware, or Chadron. She would say something like, “I saw there was a storm heading toward Philadelphia. Did that include you guys?” Or, “The Eagles game was getting a lot of snow. Did you also get a lot of snow?”

Now that she has passed away, her phone number will live forever in my memory. I will miss those calls. They were a Sunday tradition, as much as going to church in the morning.

It has not been a full month since she passed away. We visited her a week before she died, during Easter break. When we visited her for the last time, she had been at Mary Lanning Hospital for the past three months. She kept talking about when she would be released, because she was tired of all the hospital food. During that visit, it felt strange: it was the first time I had visited Hastings and had not gone to their house to see them.

But she was still in good spirits when we saw her over Easter weekend. And for the first time since arriving at the hospital, she finally got what she was craving: spaghetti.

As I write this now, and as all the memories come back, there is so much more I could say. I could write about the summers I spent there as a child, how they would drop us off at the pool, or the chest of toys we would play with, filled with treasures from the 60s to the 90s. There were times they would take us to the movies downtown, or get us McDonald’s so we could get the toy in the Happy Meal. There were May Day baskets we would make, mud pies, Easter eggs filled with dollar bills, and Wendy’s Frostys they would store in their freezer. There was the cookie drawer, filled with wafers and frosted oatmeal cookies. There were the years we would call “Elvis and Granny” for giggles.

But it will be the conversations I feel most, the phone calls, the card games, the weather reports, the family updates, the football talk, and the small questions that made distance feel smaller.

Her phone number is still in my memory. I imagine it always will be.

In Memory of Grandma Rothfuss