When my mother was born, Dianne Hodgetts, Grandpa had no time to do virtually anything with her, besides taking his turn changing diapers and putting her to bed. He was busy night and day with college work and baseball. When he graduated, he still had no time for his kids; now he was working in the real world for Sperry Gyroscope on the B-58, Hustler, and by now they had had two more kids, Aunty Linda and Uncle Steve. Despite the work however, he did love his kids and his lovely house on Long Island. He kept a loving relationship with them, though they didn’t exactly know who he was, all three of them were in diapers and had no idea what the world was. When the family moved up north to Boston, Grandpa was happily working for Honeywell, and had yet another child, Aunty Amy. By the time he really started to pay attention to his kids and have some fun with them, they were much older and he had been divorced from Bama for at least a year.
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When Bama let him take the kids, it would be for a weekend, and he had to take all four kids at the same time. He had to contemplate what to do with them for a while because he only had a small apartment in Boston; that wouldn’t be able to fit all five of them. It hit him then, he should take them up north and go skiing. All five of them used to pile into his little Volkswagen and take off north to the place they rented that year; most of the time this was a cottage or a small house, but one year when Grandpa told some nurses he knew from Harvard Business School to go up and rent him a place for the winter, they came back with the lease for an entire hotel. When Grandpa got the news of the lease he shrugged his shoulders and casually went out and sought out five partners to help him with the lease. That year was described as one of the best because the kids ran through the halls and everyone could do pretty much whatever they wanted. When they went skiing, they skied all day, and wiped themselves out, which was Grandpa’s favorite part because there would be little to no complaining. Their yearly ski trips sadly ended when Bama decided to move down to DC, and later down to Atlanta, cutting Grandpa off from seeing his four beautiful children. |