G LIKE HUMAN CONTACT!”

BY

GERRY NISKERN

My Granddaughter thinks I am as old as Methuselah. She called me yesterday from a snowy land far, far away, to check in and chat for a while. She has a small business and so does her husband.  She asked me how long it took for this country to recover from the “Great Depression”, ‘since you lived back then.’

I replied, “Well, first of all, I was born in l932, so I only experienced it as a child. But I have learned over the years of the history of our country, that the depression didn’t really stop until military production started for World Warll.”

One incident that I remember vividly was my dad coming home when I was six and saying that his hours had been cut to two days a week. But remember, we were lucky. Many fathers were out of work and had been for a long time. We lived in the country and men would come hiking along our rural road every day, looking for work in exchange for a meal. We called them bums  like our playmates did, but our mother scolded us. “Do not call them bums. They are just men out of work and having a hard time.” She always scrambled them a big plate of eggs, piled slices of bread on top and made a fresh pot of coffee.

My caller also asked me about the Spanish flu. (which by the way, did not originate in Spain.) I explained that the Spanish flu started in 1918 so I could only tell her my mother’s memories. My mother was around eight years old at the time, but she talked about it often when I was a child. The flu diminished after a year but flared up again the following year and she recalled so many people in her neighborhood dying from it. I remember her telling the story often about how she kept my sister away from everyone for a long time when she was born, in l929, because she was so frightened for her baby.

After I answered those questions, we must have talked for over two hours about lots of things. Good things. Happy times. That phone call from my beautiful granddaughter lifted my spirits like  one of those hot air balloons and I soared thru the rest of what would have been another lonely  isolation day.