Did you ever run away from home when you were a kid? At first, it seemed like a good idea, but it wasn’t long before going back sounded pretty good.
I have tried running away from home a couple of times. I must have gotten the idea from one of the rambunctious characters in Leave it to Beaver or My Three Sons. Such sitcoms of the 1960’s reflected the optimistic life of “Camelot” as Jackie Kennedy called it, following a half century of world wars and ruthless autocrats. If I was going to run away from my home and leave those people looking out for my best interest, it wasn’t going to be for very long.
My grandmother was part of the nuts and bolts of how our house was run growing up, literally the chief cook and bottle washer. I couldn’t imagine skipping one of her breakfasts, the same ones she had eaten growing up on her childhood farm in Virginia. As kids, we ate our fried mush in her separate kitchen while she told us stories of depression vagrants who sat outside her mother’s kitchen hoping for handouts on their way to nowhere. She described those lost, runaway men as sunken and hollow, but filled with gratitude when given something to eat, as if they’d been handed Christmas on a platter.
Although times were grave during the Great Depression, her mother, my great grandmother, always had enough baked potatoes in the coals to give to homeless men who waited by her back kitchen door. Always resourceful, she cut those potatoes in half, one half for eating and one for them to keep in their pocket to warm their hands for their journey. The stream of sullen men never stopped. They appeared and then went off into the fog. They were roaming the countryside, looking for any semblance of home in a homeless country, and a half-baked notion of hope in their pocket.
Despite what she had seen, my grandmother had endless optimism, and could see the brighter side of any coin toss. She was unfazed by hardship because she had walked through it, observed it and come out the other side. So, while we listened to some sad chapters of history, she let us be kids as long as possible and helped us see a world where Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn had the final say. When I announced that I was running away from home one Saturday, my grandmother was unruffled.
“Grandma, I’m running away from home.”
“Oh, okay,” she answered, looking up. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to live with the cowboys out west,” I replied putting my cap-gun in its holster.
“Well, I better make you a sandwich. You’re going to get hungry out there on the range rustling cattle and catching outlaws,” she said getting up from her sewing.
“No, Grandma,” I said quickly, “I don’t need a sandwich, I’ll be back before dinner.”
She helped me fill a bandanna with essential cowboy supplies like my matchbox cars, my Mickey badge, a package of fig newtons, a comic book, and a crayoned letter we both wrote to Wild Bill Hickock and his dog Skip. I tied the full pouch to a long stick, threw it over my shoulder, and went strolling off to the wooded lot two houses down where I settled into my new life on the range. The rumor is that I went back every fifteen minutes for something I needed, but I only remember twice, once for more fig newtons and once for a short break to watch Andy and Mayberry.
My grandmother had it right. She protected us from the horrors of what she had seen and had lived through herself but let me run away as long as I wanted. Grandmothers are wise like that.