My biological paternal grandfather lived next door to me and my brothers for three years and paid no attention to us at all. I have not a single memory of him. The same grandfather, known for his piety and daily Bible reading, had eight grandchildren in the local county orphanage five miles from his residence. He did not visit even one of them once.
Shortly after I became a fostered child at the age of eight, I and three siblings were taken by our new foster parents to visit maternal grandparents some 300 miles away. I rose early in the farmhouse on the first morning after we arrived and my new grandfather invited me to walk with him half a mile or so to milk his cow. I tell about that first morning in Children of the Manse.
“We walked side by side along the unpaved county road in a fog so dense it seemed like we were the last two human beings on earth. At first I could hear only the scrunch of gravel under the boots he called artics, but soon we were talking with each other. His voice was friendly. He asked me about my school work and what I liked to do. He didn't talk a lot about himself. He asked me question after question. He seemed to be listening closely to what I was telling him. Being with him was like being with Lonnie (my much loved biological father) because Grandpa Coulter seemed to be genuinely interested in me and that made me happy. I decided I wanted this new grandfather to like me.”
The Difference in Grandfathers
What a difference in grandfathers!!! My biological grandfather who lived next door to me and my brothers took on interest in us at all. My foster grandfather showed interest in us from the day he first met us.
The two men otherwise had much in common. They both began their adult lives as rural school teachers. Both had raised families of six children, boys and girls. Both were avid readers and both had active minds. But one paid no attention to his biological grandchildren at all. The other engaged his foster grandchildren at once and he listened to them.
Sadly, Grandpa Coulter died four years later. But something strange happened. We were with him for only a month each summer for four summers and yet he became, in my mind and in the minds of my siblings, the most important adult in our lives other than our adoptive father and mother.
Why? I think mostly because Grandpa Coulter took an interest in us. He taught us how to sharpen a scythe with a whetstone and how to build an outdoor fire place with cement and rocks from the river and how to repair a fence to keep our rented pony from escaping. He took us to work with him, one by one, in his 1937 brown Chevy and shared with us his favorite brown sugar sandwiches. He took all four of us at once twice a week to a power house on his property that pumped three modest oil wells.
While pumping the wells, he explained how the gas engine machinery worked, and gave us the whole history of the great “oil excitement” that took place when he was a boy and oil derricks were so thick they replaced forests of trees in Clarion County, Pennsylvania. Titusville, where oil was first pumped with steam technology, was less than 100 miles north of his farm. He talked about Colonel Drake, usually credited with the first productive oil well, as if he was a friend. He took down from a shelf in his power house a treasure, a small bottle of oil from that well. But most of all he who had so much to teach us also listened to us. That’s how he became our true and forever grandfather.
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