When my little sister Sally was just a baby, Momma, Pam, Marie, Sally and I had taken the old orange Union Pacific passenger train from Oregon to Wisconsin. Wisconsin might have meant home for Momma, but for me it meant Grandpa and the Beverly Hillbillies. The show came on after our bedtime. Each week Grandpa asked Momma’s permission. Each week the uncertainty plagued us. Would Momma consent this time? If we were good? We never doubted that Grandpa would ask. And every week, Momma reluctantly granted permission. As a special concession to Grandpa, we could, if we were very good, stay up late this week only and watch the Beverly Hillbillies, provided we had taken our baths, sat quietly during worship, eaten our sauerkraut without flinching, played nicely, and in general shown ourselves good and deserving children. But just this once.
Bathed and wrapped in blankets against the bitter Wisconsin winter, we girls curled on the floor in the TV room. Grandpa, in clean green cotton work pants, flannel shirt, and undershirt, his skin wrinkled and soft as calfskin from his bath, sat on the teal armless chair with the golden sparkles, legs neatly crossed at the knees, hands folded in his lap. A Coke bottle sat on the table beside him. A round black Copenhagen can lived in his breast pocket, though we girls weren’t supposed to know about that. Grandpa sneaked snuff—“sneus,” he called it—from the can whenever he thought he could get away with it.
