Tell Me a Story
My grandpa Bob told exceptional stories. They weren’t set on some epic stage, unless one considers Adair, Iowa epic, nor were they were particularly heroic, except perhaps the one where he helped wrestle a deranged man with a gun to the ground.
His stories were fantastic simply because he was the one who told them.
Grandpa Bob had hundreds of stories in his repetoire. There was the tale about riding a pony to school, a pony he purposely didn’t feed in the morning because the pony, knowing where his food was kept, would walk itself back home after dropping off Grandpa Bob. I’m not sure if I was supposed to be impressed with Grandpa Bob’s problem solving or the pony’s, but either way it was a good story. Then, there was the story about the first house he and my grandmother lived in on honeymoon hill, a house that unfortunately was also home to a family of racoons living in the crawlspace. I’ll let you decide how that story ends, but know it involved tearing out some floorboards.
We would laugh when he told us how he and his friend got sprayed by a skunk, their stench so awful that his mother forced them to undress and bathe outside in the cold before entering the house. We would groan when he told us that his farmhouse in was located on the M&M divide and that if you peed off the roof, half would run to the Mississippi River and the rest to the Missouri. And we would smile when he told the story about trapping animals and selling their hides until he made enough money to buy sheep, only to sell the sheep’s offspring so he could buy a car. It’s a far more interesting “first job” story than my own.
There were stories about learning how to pilot airplanes for his construction job, making parachutes for kittens (I’m told no kittens were harmed), stealing watermelons from a field (one watermelon was harmed), pulling the leg hair of basketball players who were taller than him so they would be less willing to jump (unknown number of players harmed), and many, many more. These were among his “greatest hits” and if you knew Grandpa Bob for any length of time at least one of these stories is familiar to you.
I have my own Grandpa Bob stories I like to tell. Like the time he mailed me a Maid Rite napkin with “You’re too old for birthday cards,” written on it. I think I was twelve. Or the time he and I were out driving and got a call from the construction company he worked for stating they had misjudged the rain and their trucks needed to dump their asphalt before the weather hit. That was the day the driveway at his farm got paved. We also tore down the old chicken coop at his farm, and by tore down I mean he dug a hole and then used his skid loader to push the coop into the hole before setting it on fire, only to discover that the rubble contained cans of something explosive. It wasn’t our finest moment.
Some of my favorite Grandpa Bob stories are the ones that others tell about him. There are countless stories about Grandpa Bob building or fixing something to help someone out. Well after retirement, he was the defacto handyman for the folks in assisted living and the nursing home across the street from his house. Multiple people have told me how he cared for his wife as she was dying of colon cancer, how he made sure she was never alone and was as comfortable as she could be. My wife likes the story about Grandpa Bob taking me on a trip to Antietam and Gettysburg, where every evening he would casually suggest we stop at Friendly’s Ice Cream to end our day, as if I needed convincing. I like hearing stories from others because it reminds me how kind and generous he was, and how he would go out of his way to make life better for someone else.
Even in his final years, and in the throes of dementia, he was always trying to give someone something. He would collect coloring sheets intended for the residents at his home and give them to my mom so she could give them to “the kids,” though we weren’t always sure what kids he was talking about. He tried to give me multiple pairs of shoes, his dinner, his chair, and several books. Always a tinkerer, he made things for people to the very end of his life. We have several of his creations around the house. He liked to say hi to the kids that would occasionally visit the place where he lived and make them laugh with a plastic pig that oinked when he squeezed it. He always wanted to show you “somethin’ interestin,’” especially if that something was the ladies undergarment section of the 1907 Sears and Roebuck catalog he had in his room. I think my wife got to see it about fourteen times.
There are so many stories, stories that are so engrained in me they feel like they’re mine, though he was the one who lived them all. He didn’t come from money, he wasn’t a good student, but he was kind, and he worked hard, and he treated people well, and he lived adventures that I loved hearing about for the 41 years I knew him. If you can judge the value of a man’s life by his stories, then Bob Cooper lived an exceptional 90 years. He will be greatly missed.
And yet…
I will think of that damn chicken coop, and kittens with parachutes, and that house on honeymoon hill every time I drive by Adair. I will chuckle every time I use a Maid Rite napkin. I’ll roll my eyes every time I see an old Sears and Roebuck catalog and if Holly’s with me, will likely suggest she might find the pages featuring corsets and petticoats “interestin’.” I’ll remember the way he took care of my grandmother every time I see her wedding ring on my wife’s finger. I’ll think of him every time I have some ice cream.
I, and the hundreds of other people whose lives he touched, will carry his stories, and through those stories, him, for the rest of our lives. That’s his legacy. He was and will forever be a story well told about a life well lived.
