3/4th of a Century

3/4th of a Century represents my age, as I will be 75 years old (young? Never understood why some folks refer to older folks as '75 years young'.), the Lord willing, on my upcoming September 6th birthday.  OK, this is only January 14, 2016, but I always think of myself at the future age I will become, once I am in that year.

During this time, the country (USA) has gone from a rather conservative position, (at least where I lived as a young child, which at earliest memory was in rural Pennsylvania) through a very promiscuous 'free love' time in the 1960's, and then returned to a conservative point, and am not quite sure what you would call it, today.  Probably location dependent.  Which may always have been the case.  I did move more than most, especially for not having been military connected, either by parentage or marriage, during the earlier part of my life.  In the past 34 years, however, it has been somewhat related to military, as that is the time span of my current (fourth, give or take one) marriage to a Navy career man, now retired from the Navy, and have settled, so far, in one place for the past 10 years.

My concentration this morning is to be on the deaths of loved ones that I have endured, over all these years.  Some terribly tragic ones, and some less so, but none fit the category of 'old age' or 'natural causes.'  (Is there ever such a thing?) 

My earliest memory of a loved one's passing is that of my paternal Great Grandma Shimer.  She died of Diabetes.  I remember meeting & seeing  her only once, and I was 4 years old.  She was the biggest (& by that I mean "fattest") person I had ever met, by then.  Her husband, my Great Grandpa Reverend George Shimer was quite a small man, as evidenced in a photo standing next to me when I was 8 years old.  That was taken when his daughter, my Grandma Madeline Shimer, passed away.  I accompanied my mother to Hagerstown, MD, from Rockville, PA (an unincorporated area outside South Fork, which was a small town, with closest larger city Johnstown.) but was not permitted to go to the funeral.  Family thought I should remember her as she was when alive & not the site of her in a casket.  Mother disagreed, but was over-ruled.  I had wanted to go, but at that age rarely had any say in what I got to do. 

Grandma Madeline died from an allergic reaction to a Wasp Bite on her big toe!  My dad refused to agree to an autopsy, but that was the doctor's position. 

Very shortly after that, I met my Daddy's father, Earl Atwood Van Vechten, when he came to Rockville to visit my mother & I where we lived at her mother's and step-father's home.  Of that visit I mainly remember throwing a ball, in the living room, and he was sitting in a chair and it hit him in the head.  Later when I was told of his death, and they said it was caused by a Brain Aneurism I wondered if it was my fault?  Of course they told me that it wasn't.  It was years later that he had died, but that was how my mind and memory went. 

Then my mother remarried when I was 8 1/2 years old and the three of us moved to Johnstown.  I was in the second half of the third grade by then, and that was to be the first change of schools which turned out to be a total of 15 schools in the 11 years of my school grades.  Although it was at the end of my 10th grade in high school that I was put on a plane & sent to Dallas, TX to get married at age 16 to the first boy to ask me; he was 17.  James Royce Braley and I had met on my last weekend in Dallas before being flown to NJ by my father, after my begging him nearly a solid year to 'get me out of the "Hell hole" I found myself in.  My mother had sent me to live with my dad & step-mother in 1954 when she hitch-hiked, alone, from Johnstown, PA to Dallas, TX.  The doctors had told her she would not live through another PA winter, and that she needed to go to a warmer climate location for her health.  In PA she had Bronchitis & Pneumonia most winters, and they were becoming more sever as she aged.  She had asthma since age four. When I was in the 7th grade the doctor came to the house (not unusual for back then, in rural areas, especially) to treat her & told me I needed to stay home from school to take care of her and that I could go to school when she was 'dead and gone.' 

... to be continued