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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
January 31, 2010
Published as Family History in a
Gramma Letter dated March 14, 1995.
© 2010 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Woman With Eyeglasses, 1968
© 1968 by Bud Grossmann
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MAGIC ON THE FARM
Tuesday, March 14, 1995
Dear Gramma,
Occasionally during the summers that my brothers and sister and I spent on your Wisconsin farm, one or another of our belongings would fall victim to “the Disappearing Act.” You usually warned us before you confiscated something: when you saw that we had shot out all the light bulbs in the lower level of the barn, you declared, “If you boys don’t know how to use those BB guns properly, I’ll have to make them do the Disappearing Act!” The things you took, you usually returned.
Once when I was, I guess probably thirteen, Uncle Bob gave me a blunt-billed hat. How he got it, I don’t know. I never saw him wear it, but it was not new. It was faded and sweat-stained, a cap of smooth cotton with wide and narrow stripes like those on the denim of a bed pillow, except these stripes were a strange purple and a dull yellow. It was truly ugly, this cap, but I loved it. Perhaps I loved it all the more because you did not. I was arriving at an age when I needed to annoy my elders. “Oh, Buddy,” you would sometimes sigh, “why do you have to aggravate me so!” And come to think of it, Gram, I guess you still ask that question once in a while, don’t you, even now when I am coming up on forty-six years of age.
The fabric of the crown of my hat, resting upon my bristly crewcut, was so thin that I could feel deer flies when they alighted atop my head. I continued to wear the cap even after I left it outside overnight once on your front porch and crickets chewed up the leather sweatband, causing it to be scratchy against my scalp.
One day, when I couldn’t find the cap, I asked you, Gramma, whether you had seen it. You gave a vague denial, along the lines of, “I don’t know why you’d want to wear such an ugly thing, anyway.” The cap didn’t turn up again; I suppose it’s possible one of your dogs carried it away. I didn’t grieve for long.
That same summer, or maybe the next, you caused something else to disappear, a single page from a novel. You and Grampa had taken us kids into town in your Studebaker. I was reading a paperback in the back seat, and I forgot to bring it into the house when we got home. This, I think, was something else Uncle Bob had brought to the farm, a pass-the-time book, pulp fiction. When I found it again, in your station wagon, I noticed immediately it was missing a page. Just inside the front cover the “teaser” page was gone. That page had contained a few tantalizing intimations of the plot, and it featured a six-word sentence, probably the steamiest in the entire volume. Yes, it was gone, that one page. Nothing remained of it but a ragged, brittle sliver along the book’s binding.
“Gramma!” I said, in surprise. “Did you tear something out of this book?”
“I certainly did,” you answered. “I made it do the Disappearing Act. What business do you have, Buddy, reading such indecent talk?”
Your question was not an invitation for discussion, so I said no more. I flipped through the surviving pages and saw that you had left the rest of the novel intact. Perhaps you considered your duty complete, once you got rid of the page most in danger of being seen by one of the younger readers in our family.
Today, thirty-some years later, I no longer recall the title of that thirty-five-cent paperback. I remember none of the characters’ names, almost nothing of the story. But the salacious six-word statement that you caused to disappear? That, my dear grandmother, still remains bright in my memory! And so, today, I thank you and, as always, I love you!
Love,
Buddy
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I would welcome your thoughts on this page (or any of my
others). Write to me at the following address. Please
be sure to spell Grossmann with two n’s and
mention what page you are writing about.
Thanks! BUD GROSSMANN
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This page was first published as a WoW on January 31, 2010, 0141 CST;
it was updated May 25, 2018, at 5:00PM CDT.
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© 2010, 2018 by Bud Grossmann
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