A sad day, but happy memories

Grandpa Harold, this summer

My Grandpa Harold passed away Wednesday evening. I have been thinking about him almost constantly since, and I have a few memories/stories I want to share.

He always had full-size candy bars at his house. Not those little "fun-size" candy bars - we are talking the FULL SIZE, normal, grocery-store check-out lane candy bars. The kind that your mother never lets you eat. Grandpa Harold bought loads of them and when we would go over to his house he always offered us one (and of course we took it) and then we would sit in the dining room and he would talk about the birds he saw at his bird feeder, or show us some of them in his books. And at the time I remember thinking, "Wow, birds are really boring, but I like these candy bars so much that I'm going to sit here and listen to Grandpa talk about them." Now I kind of wish I would have listened to the bird stories better because whenever I see a strange-looking bird I always think, "I wonder what kind of bird that is?" And now, in honor of Grandpa Harold, I'm going to actually start looking it up.

He had really interesting books at his house - all non-fiction. Mostly biographies.

When I was about 7, my little sister Megan was born. My sister Miranda and I stayed at Grandpa and Gram's house overnight while my mom had the baby. The next morning Grandpa made us breakfast and gave us orange juice. It tasted AWFUL. We tried to choke it down but it was so disgusting. We felt bad though and didn't mention anything to Grandpa. When we visited my mom in the hospital, we told her that we had fun at Grandpa & Gram's but the orange juice was rotten or spoiled or something. My mom told Grandpa Harold this, and he burst out laughing. "That wasn't orange juice, that was grapefruit juice!"

This one is kind of gross, but funny: Grandpa and Gram took us to the Iowa State Fair every summer. We would go through all the buildings but Grandpa's favorite was all the animal barns. One year we were looking at the huge pig and Grandpa, totally forgetting that he was with his small grandchildren, said, "Wow, look at the balls on that one!"

And I was just back in Des Moines in August. My dad, Megan, and I were visiting with Grandpa Harold and he started talking about a relative's hysterectomy. He was always interested in medical procedures and kind of assumed that everyone else was as well, no matter how private the procedure was. So he said, "Yep, and they did the whole thing vaginally! Just took everything out RIGHT through the VAGINA! Can you believe that?" We were all at a loss for words. "Wow," I said, "so how about those Cubs?"

He was always so proud and interested in everything all of his grandchildren were doing. When I was in graduate school in Indiana, whenever I returned home I inevitably got the same question over and over again from most people... "When are you going to be done?" But Grandpa kept track of my progress and always knew how long I had left. For a man without a college education, he knew a lot about graduate studies, academia, and pretty much everything else. I dedicated my dissertation to him.

We'll miss you Grandpa.