Crones

 When I was a toddler, my great-grandmother Merle Crone, my father’s maternal grandmother,  was a widow who managed a bar and restaurant in the tiny town of Pomona Park, Florida.The business was the namesake of both her and my deceased great-grandfather George, aptly named, “Crones.” My grandfather built the business with her, and managed it, until one night in 1970, which altered the course of my family forever.

Grandma Crone passed away when I was thirteen. She always seemed classy to me, but a little disconnected, like something was always on her mind.  I remember her clothes being very fashionable for the time and she drove a cream-colored Cadillac, her hair always perfect, a beautiful silver bob. My grandmother was a very put together woman most of her life, so it was difficult to watch when her bones and her mind both began to fail her. In her elderly years, she became very frail and small. On one occasion, Grandma Crone needed a bath and my father asked me to help bathe her in the tub. I sat on the edge of the tub with the sponge, taking in the vulnerability of the moment, the tub full of soapy water, my tiny grandma sitting there with her knees bent, and hands around her legs, pulling them closer, not to cover up but to get warmer. I was taking in what time and gravity do to the female body.. I wondered if it embarrassed her for me to see her this way, but when I looked at her eyes, she was somewhere else.  

I never bonded with her like I wanted to, but we did share one special moment I will never forget. One night, she took me outside in the dark alone. It was very out of character for her, and I was confused. She pointed up to the sky and said, “Do you see that?” I looked. I did see something, but I had no idea what I was looking at. “That is Halley’s Comet,” she whispered to me. “It only comes around every 76 years.” I was fascinated as I stared up at the night sky and happy that she took the time to show me, and just me, as I often felt overlooked with my dad’s family. Grandma Crone smiled down at me after a few moments. With her hand on my shoulder, she said. “Maybe one day, you will show it to your great-granddaughter too.”

In her final years, she began to suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease with rapid decline. In her mind, my father was my grandfather, and my brother was my father, and in time they just accepted being called the names of the men who existed before them. Grandma Crone even took to calling our little Chihuahua named “Tinkerbell”, “Queenie” instead. Queenie was her childhood dog of the same breed. It was like my grandmother had gone back in time thirty years in her mind, but was physically stuck here in the present, with us. Toward the end of her life the paranoia from the disease became exhausting and painful for my father, who was constantly being accused of either robbing her blind or plotting her death, which was hard to watch, as he had completely given up his life to care for her, her sister, and his mother. While watching the grandmother that raised him, once witty and strong, wither away, he was also caring for his mother, a childhood victim of polio who was wheel-chair bound and epileptic.

When I was 9, I witnessed grandma Patty have a grand-mal seizure. Dad immediately took action, instructing Grandma Crone to call for help, frantically looking for a pen. Dad couldn’t find something to press her tongue down with so he risked losing a finger as she was starting to turn blue. Her airway was blocked and he had to take immediate action. Since we lived a quarter of a mile from the highway, and my dad feared for what we might see, he ordered me and my brother to run to the highway as fast as we could and flag down the ambulance. I felt adrenaline running through my veins, fearing for my grandma, and wanting to do my part. Thankfully, my dad’s intervention worked, and by the time the ambulance had arrived, my grandma’s seizure was over and she was breathing fine. Thankfully, Patty didn’t have her dentures in that morning, and my dad only suffered a badly bruised finger for his trouble.

Dad’s relationship with his mom had been complicated. She was only married to his father for a short time, and after they divorced, she left my toddler father with her parents and lived the single life during his childhood. According to dad, she spent a lot of time in the bars when he was a kid, and most of his parenting was left to his grandparents.. Still though, she was his mother, and he loved her and so he took care of her when she needed him to.

Taking care of old ladies was my dad’s full time job. While he wasn’t paid, his living expenses were covered by them while he cared for them. He had been a manager of Crone’s restaurant and lounge for years, assisting my grandmother ever since my grandfather had died. She really needed help running the business those first few years of grief. It hit her hard, and according to my dad, her mental decline originated then. He dedicated his life to his grandfather’s legacy, but that was cut short about a decade later when the family business burned to the ground. Dejected and tired, my grandmother relocated to Melrose, to live across a dirt road from her sister, one of twelve siblings, Sara “Dorothy” Sargeant, Aunt Dot to me. Grandma Crone put two single-wide trailers on 20 acres that had been in her family for over a century. My grandma and her only child, my grandma Patty, and my little brother James lived in the trailer that could be seen from the road. I would stay in my brother’s room when I visited. Directly behind us, my dad lived alone, mostly living out of the master bedroom. The rest of his trailer felt like a museum as it looked like it had been lived in, but my dad avoided those areas, like they were off-limits, and in turn, so did us kids. 

In the early years at Melrose, Aunt Dot lived with Aunt Abby across from us. Dad farmed an acre of land behind their house which provided all of us with an abundance of veggies. Dad always had a green thumb, which he later put to use building and growing several raised bed gardens. Aunt Abby was an older woman of no relation, who was so hard of hearing, that the entire neighborhood could hear when my dad asked her a question. “Abby! Do you want a slice of mincemeat pie?!” Abby would look up at my dad in confusion. It would start to get comical after the third or fourth repetition, louder each time, and for some reason, reminding me of Foghorn Leghorn. “I said, ABBY, DO YOU WANT A SLICE…(he would gather a large breath)...OF MINCE MEAT PIE?” Abby nodded slowly seeming to understand when dad put the whole pie in front of her. After Abby passed away, Aunt Dot moved in with us and sold her property. She began sharing a room with Grandma Patty, as there were no free beds to spare. 

They shared a room for a few years, and mostly got along with each other, except for that one time when they fought over the temperature of the electric blanket. You see, Grandma Patty stayed cold, and Dot had her own internal furnace. After a blowout over the darn thing, they bought a dual-controlled electric blanket, so they could each control their own side. This was a perfect solution until one night, when the controls were accidentally reversed. They took turns waking up that night, each adjusting what they thought were their own controls. Grandma Patty, freezing, turned the dial to ten, and Aunt Dot, now burning up, turned hers all the way to zero. It wasn’t until the next morning as they were retelling of their horrible night, that the mystery was solved.

Aunt Dot’s health declined to the point that we had to put a hospital bed in the living room for her to spend her final days. Dad’s responsibilities increased to include daily cleaning and changing of Dot’s colostomy bag. I was in awe of my father and all of his burdens and how he handled them with grace and mostly joy. He spent his days gardening, cooking, and caring for the old ladies, a far cry from the hustle and bustle of cooking in the restaurant kitchen and running the bar at the lounge. Those days were long gone.

In the early seventies, late nights for the bar portion of the family business meant late nights coming home for Grandpa George. When my dad was 19 years old, and the business was at its zenith, Grandma Crone woke him in the middle of the night. Grandpa hadn’t come home from the restaurant, and she was worried sick. It wasn’t like him to be late, and her gut told her that something was terribly wrong. According to my dad, he drove more than a hundred miles an hour in a panic to get to his grandpa as soon as possible. His gut was setting off alarms too. What he found there when he arrived changed his life forever. The man who raised him, the man he admired so much, was lying on the floor covered in blood, already gone. My grandfather was murdered and for just a few hundred dollars. He had been stabbed, shot, and left for dead, his murderers never found.

In my thirties, I went to watch Lori Gill, a local singer, perform her Patsy Cline show, “An Evening with Patsy Cline” at the Woman’s Club. A lifelong fan of Patsy, I had been dying to see Lori’s renditions of my favorite artist, and I must say that it was a worthy likeness. Since I attended alone, during intermission, I made conversation with an eldery woman sitting next to me, as I’m known to do when the mood strikes. After just a few short moments with the woman whose name I have since forgotten, we made an incredible connection. After she told me she lived in Pomona Park, I mentioned Grandma Crone and her restaurant. “Well, I’ll be,” the sweet lady gasped. “Merle was my best friend!” My jaw dropped. What a coincidence. “Boy, what happened with your grandpa. That was horrible. I was by her side through that whole thing. You know the police thought she might have something to do with it?” After a short pause, where she seemed to be reflecting back, “That investigation was so hard on her.” She looked down and shook her head slowly. This stranger was giving me insight into my own family that I had never known. My grandma’s friend went on to share with me how deeply my family was impacted by his death. Intermission was over, and so was our chance meeting.

My father never got over it. He began drinking to deal with the memories, and the drinking became part of his identity. When the drinking was mixed with anger, it wasn’t pretty. He tried to straighten himself out with the military, but that only lasted as long as service. During the years of taking care of the old ladies, I was hopeful he had shed those demons, as I only saw him drunk once or twice during those years. Sadly, when they all passed, and he was alone again, he returned to the bottle for comfort, eventually losing his life to it. All those years, my dad kept my grandfather’s writings and journals to stay close to him, and he left them to me when he passed away. Now, it feels like I know the Grandpa who died before I was born by reading some of his inner thoughts, his self-improvement notes, and recognizing my writing in his own. I found efficiency notes from a Frank Gilbreth book in his  things, which made me laugh out loud. Frank was the father in “Cheaper by the Dozen,” one of my absolutely favorite books of all time. I was always fascinated by the efficiency routines Frank implemented in his home with his kids, like French lessons via victrola during showers, and it looked like my grandpa shared my fascination

I had always thought that I was the first on either side of my family to go to college, but after researching my grandpa’s history, I discovered that he actually graduated with an A.S. in Agricultural Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and evidence of his work as an orchard inspector can be found in his notes. He also documented his train ride to the south, with beautiful details of the foliage that I haven’t seen since Lucy Maude Montgomery gave me three whole pages describing a grove of poplars. Suddenly, my dad’s dedication to farming and his very successful green thumb made so much more sense to me. When he was gardening, he was never alone. At the very least, his memories of Grandpa Crone were with him. While I didn’t inherit that green thumb, I do make an effort every year, cultivating more memories than produce I must admit. 

I am proud to be George’s granddaughter and carry on his legacy, not as a farmer, but as a writer, and while it’s doubtful I will ever finish the novel he started, I am inspired to do what he did best...write from experience.