Sarah Nigbor

I wish I could go back in time and tell my grandparents thank you for all the things they taught me, some inadvertently, some intentionally. The older I get, the more I realize the wisdom with which they lived their lives. I grew up without my dad, but I was given the wonderful gift of my grandparents helping my mom raise me, which gave me a glimpse into that Greatest Generation I might not have had.

Grandma and Grandpa Lundgren lived simply. They were not flashy people, nor did they appreciate tomfoolery or nonsense. This doesn’t mean they didn’t know how to have fun; they both had a good sense of humor. Grandpa didn’t always talk a lot, but he let loose zingers out of nowhere that stopped you in your tracks sometimes. For example, the time that I caught an elderly relative (by marriage) right before she fell while walking across the lawn at a family reunion. She became indignant, flapping her arms and fussing for me to let her go. I was 14, shy and mortified. I hadn’t wanted her to fall to the ground and was only trying to help. Tail between my legs, I went and sat next to Grandpa at a picnic table. “You should’ve let the old bag fall,” he whispered in my ear. Only he didn’t say “bag.” That turned an embarrassing moment into an often-repeated family joke.

The laughter and fun really came out when Grandpa’s sister Lorraine and her husband Norman visited. Norman would spend hours telling ridiculous jokes; my favorite was one about a parrot named Zelda who swore in church. My grandma would laugh so hard that she couldn’t speak, with tears running down her face. When she finally could take a breath, she’d start laughing again. She was normally pretty stoic, so it was fun to see her like that. The two couples would play cards or dice; when I was old enough, they taught me the card game “99.” It was my great pleasure to beat Uncle Norman, which made my Grandpa smile and wink at me. Grandpa also taught me to play dominoes and 654 during his lunch breaks in the summer. Yahtzee or Aggravation were their other games of choice.

I always begged to play “the farm game” every year on my birthday. It was this old trivia game, gotten who knows where, that sat in Grandma’s hall closet. It had the most obscure farming facts that I couldn’t possibly know; Grandma, Mom and I would play while Grandpa would be “reading” in the living room. Whenever it was my turn, he’d shout out the right answer, I would repeat it and Mom would have a fit. We are very competitive.

Many evenings or Sunday afternoons were spent reading. Each of us had a book to dive into and the only sound was the soft tick, tick, tick of the house clocks. I’ll admit, at times it could drive me mad. Now if I have an opportunity to sit reading in a silent house with just the clock ticking, I’m brought back to those days. My mom and grandparents all loved to read and they passed it onto me.

I’ve been thinking about longevity lately and I believe my grandparents lived as long as they did (93 for him, 96 for her) because they didn’t eat a bunch of processed food, stuck to water and coffee, worked hard well into their old age and valued the simple things. They were not wealthy people, but to me, they were rich in the ways that mattered.