She’ll Keep

This story is perhaps a little irreverent, but it’s true and some may appreciate the humor in it.

My father’s mother was “old beyond her years”. During my growing up years she had gotten to the point that she was in a nursing home, even though she was only in her late 50’s or early 60’s. She was thin, unhealthily so, and always a complainer. Whenever we visited her she would always be complaining about something – how the staff treated her poorly, how they wouldn’t come when she called, how the food was bad – pretty much anything you could complain about. The staff in the nursing homes would eventually get so tired of her complaining that they would ask her to leave, so I don’t think I ever visited her more than a couple of times at any one place. Eventually she got early onset dementia (they didn’t call it Alzheimer’s back then) and so she was placed in the “Insane Asylum”, i.e. the State Hospital in Middletown, CT.

It was a few years later, in the summer of 1963, that our family was on vacation. We had gone to New Hampshire, camping. Our first stop was to see some people who had at one time lived in Waterbury and who had gone to our church. They lived in Durham, NH. From there we went to a campground in the middle of the state where we stayed for several days. The Fourth of July was on Thursday and we went to a county fair where the big event of the evening was a huge stack of railroad ties with a car perched on the top. They set it on fire and everyone waited until the pile burned down enough that the car came crashing down into an explosion of burning embers.

The following weekend we were going to finish our vacation, and, as the 4^th and 5^th had been holidays, my father had also taken off Monday the 8^th as our final day. Then came the fateful phone call…

On Sunday, July 7^th, my grandmother passed away in the state hospital. My father was the executor of the will, but as he wasn’t around, they called my aunt Dot who lived in the same town as we did. She was desperate to find my father, but the only thing she knew was that we were going to be visiting this family in Durham, so she called them. They didn’t know where we were, but recalled that my father had mentioned to them that we were going to a campground in the center part of the state. So she then called the NH State Police and convinced them that she needed desperately to reach my father at a campground somewhere in that part of the state. They started visiting the various campgrounds to see if we were registered and eventually located us. The owner of the campground came down to get my father (it was probably a half-mile or more from the “store” at the camp entrance to where the campsites were located), and he drove out to the store to call my aunt.

She told him what had happened and said that he had to come home to CT immediately. But in my father’s characteristic understated way, he only replied “She’ll keep” and said that we would come home the following day as we had originally planned. My aunt was very upset with him that he wouldn’t interrupt our vacation and come home that very day. When my father came back to the campground, he told this story to my mother (and within earshot of me) and my mother only laughed.

I can only imagine the scene back in CT when my aunt heard those words – “She’ll keep”!