My Grandpa Lockwood lived with us when we were growing up. Or I think I should say we lived with him, since he is the one that owned the house. He must have been permanently depressed. I don’t remember ever hearing him laugh. Or maybe there was nothing to laugh about. It was his house and his wife had passed on and sometime after that we moved in. There was my Dad and Mom and three brothers and myself. That was no laughing matter. He was extremely deaf and if somebody did happen to say something funny he wouldn’t hear it. He kept the fire going. He sat in his rocker, which sat as near to the stove as possible. The stove was a pot bellied wood stove. He fed the stove wood almost constantly. He would bring wood in from the woodpile each day and he would split the wood and stack it and whatever else you do with wood. That was his job. I think he assigned it to himself. When it rained he would get up and go to the front door and open it and turn around and say, “It’s raining”, and go sit down again. Ten minutes later he would get up and go open the door and turn around and say, “It’s still raining”. Out side of giving us a weather report on a regular basis and taking care of the stove, he didn’t have much else to do. In decent weather he would take a long walk each day. He walked with his fingers locked together behind his back. He walked all over the farm and when he returned he would lie down under a shade tree on the hard ground and take a long nap. He lived to be 89 and that was a very long life in 1941. He never went to the doctor that I knew of. Except one time when he was chopping wood the ax head flew off of the handle and hit him in the head. It caused a large gash and much bleeding. Dad took him to the doctor and he came home with a large bandage wrapped around his head. I hope he got pain medicine from the doctor. Nobody went to the doctor unless you were seriously ill. For one thing doctors didn’t have the medicine or tests for everything then as they do now. We gripe a lot about our medical care and those things, but we still are much better off now than back then. In those days if you were ill a family member would go to the doctor and explain the ailment and if there were a medicine for it, the doctor would give it to you. I am not positive about this, but I think the doctor kept medicine in his office instead of writing prescriptions. I guess I could have researched that, but I don’t have time. I’m busy writing this for the blog. This is all for now.
