WHO WOULD YOU CHOOSE TO CHAT WITH FROM PAST?

The question posed during a discussion group was: If you could sit on a park bench and chat with anyone from your past, who would it be?

Several names raced through my mind as I attempted to answer that question.

I wondered what happened to the eighth-grade girl I fell in love with when I was in the fifth grade only to learn that she eloped with a guy who showed up at her rural Missouri home in a new car.

Or the political science professor who survived fighting through Europe in the infantry during World War II and later challenged me to think “outside the box” and to take risks I never thought possible later in life.

Then my Grandma Fannie Franks came to mind. I could spend hours talking to her about her childhood, about how she, a 12-year-old, was responsible for picking up dry cow chips to fuel evening campfires as she and her family traveled from Pennsylvania to Kansas with a wagon train in 1881.

I wish now that I had asked Fannie more questions about her childhood, about growing up on a Kansas wheat ranch, about walking miles to a one-room schoolhouse.

My grandmother held fast to family and religious values but shunned social convention in so many areas of her life. This daring-do was exemplified in her courtship and marriage to Andy, a young farmer.

Andy was the youngest of several brothers in a family that would purchase and then pay for a farm for the eldest son before he married, then repeat the process for the next eldest.

Fannie shocked the community by proposing to Andy and convincing him that they didn’t have to wait for years to be married. They could buy and pay for their own quarter-section of land, which they did.

They reared a daughter, my mother, who attended a nearby one-room school through eight grades. A lot of farm girls didn’t attend high school but prepared for marriage.

Fannie instructed Andy to buy property and to build a house in nearby Glasco, which he did. My mother attended high school there. Again, high school grads normally married.

Fannie helped her daughter pack a suitcase and put her on a train en route to the University of Kansas where she was a Phi Beta Kappa student and later became a teacher.

Fannie lived and cooked meals on a wood stove all of her life, never enjoyed such modern conveniences as an indoor bathroom. She had perfect teeth but fell victim to appendicitis when she was in her late 50s.

My grandmother refused to undergo surgery but eventually was convinced that the alternative was dying. So, she talked the doctors into rigging up mirrors so she could “keep an eye” on them during the procedure.

That was my grandmother, a person who may have been responsible for a lot of unorthodox and unconventional behavior of those who followed in her footsteps.

Yes, I would love to sit on a park bench and chat with my grandmother. I have hundreds of questions, many that I forgot to ask during earlier conversations.

I wouldn’t need to ask if she loved me. I know because she once picked up a chicken in her back yard, walked it to the market, sold it and gave me a nickel for spending money. She also always served me the biggest piece of my favorite apple pie.