grampa roy hoovers house...
pt. 5
it was a great feeling to cross beaverton rd and see grammas house just ahead.there was an unfamilar car in the driveway,which i soon found out belonged to theo and vane.seeing gramma was as special as ever,she wasnt surprised by my hair since she had been out to cali the year before.and hell,hadn;t i leaft my mother and sister in san diego?.thats why the car was there, for them to use.little did i know how much driving i would be doing with it...
don't recall a whole lot of details,just the high points.one afternoon/evening we went to visit some of the hoovers,uncle dan and his family.turns out i wasn't the only longhair in the hoover family,cousin dan had grown his out too.he and i are right around the same age,and everyone told us how much we looked alike.had to be the hoover influence,as the males in the family tend to resemble one another.
got high with a couple of them,and went to some party with a live band.i do believe alchohol may have been involved,since i remember less of the party than usual.that was the last time i saw,or spoke to any of them.i did write a short piece on my uncle dans obit,to which several of my cousins responded to via email.alas i got no phone numbers,and the email addresses are gone now too.needless to say i wish i had been able to keep in touch...but then again none of them contacted me when my dad passed the year before.
i remember visiting all the allen relatives,in dover and elsewhere.and of course my hair turned out to be a topic of discussion...so much so that i soon tired of it.even tho i had wanted to make an impression ! so i guess that saying about "being careful what you wish for" has some meaning after all...not really the first time i learned that lesson.and unfortunately not the last...
grampa hoover oddly enough didn't really talk about the hair,outside of a comment about damn hippies.although others of his grandchildren had long hair he seemed to be a bit perturbed about mine.i suppose it could the fact he hadn't seen me for years and it was a bit of a shock,where it had been gradual with the other kids.never did find out,just another of lifes little mysteries.i found out several years later i had unknowingly seem my uncle dwayne as he drove his family up old 27.he told me later on he had seen this longhair on margret allens porch playing guitar.didn't realise it was me.and i'm,to this day not sure if grampa even told him mom and cyndi and i were in town.in the old days he would have stopped and said hi.but apparently the times they were a changin..
i also got roped into driving the ladies up to kathi and jeffs in u.p.all i really remember of that is endless miles of trees and pastures,little towns,pastures and endless miles of trees.hahahaha now that i think about it the clearest visual i have of that side trip is passing by spikehorns place twice...
3 comments:
Holy crap I didn't realize or remember you drove all the way up to the U.P. At the time they lived way up in Houghton, which is about as far as you can go. I never even went up there although I had gone to Pinconning when Kathy, Jeff and the kids lived there, which is nowhere near as far and in the lower peninsula. I have seen pictures of gramma at the house in S.D. and can remember taking her to the airport etc. The only ones I remember on your dad's side are you grampa Roy, and Dwayne as far as I remember. Wish I had a pic of you sitting on gramma's porch playing guitar, that would been cool, that part of your story resinates as how small yet separate a world of relatives we sometimes live in. Part of life I guess.
yep, houghton is where we went.i wish i still had any pics from that trip,i may have had one of me on the porch playing.as far as relatives go,i was always closer with the allen side.just the way it was...
Weird bit on Uncle Dan passing by but was never told you were there. I had forgotten you went up to the UP to see Kathy and Jeff and their little kids at the time. That must have been when we went back to Lansing. Later you all came down one last time and stayed over night. I believe that is when Bill stayed with us as well.
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