"There's More Than One Way To Eat A Kaythryn."

Hum… maybe you shouldn’t enter your name as a word on this site.

"You Can Really Taste The Kaythryn!"

"The Best Part of Waking Up is Kaythryn in Your Cup"

"More Kaythryn Please."

On second though, yes, enter your name.

My grandfather died when I was five. I didn’t know what was going on. I sat by his hospital bed and held his hand, asked him to tell me stories but he couldn’t speak.

He was dying of lung cancer.

I wasn’t even really sad. Nothing seemed quite real at that age. I remember at his funeral everyone was fighting and crying and all I remember of my emotions was that I felt guilty for not crying like everyone else.

My mother talks about him a lot and it’s hard to say if he was a good man or not.

I loved him.

He made me toys, cooked steak and corn on the cob every time I came over, gave me the orange Popsicles from the top of the freezer, and would hold me in one hand whenever we went anywhere. The mean old man that he was wore a little bright colored pointed birthday hat and blew on a kazoo for me at my birthday.

I brought him a plastic dove one day and he spun me a story about how the dove used to be a real flesh and blood dove. There was a beautiful tree in the story, and as the dove was flying, which he demonstrated with the toy, it turned to plastic and came to me.

He wasn’t always so sweet, though. He left his wife and his six kids from that marriage repeatedly for months or years at a time with no money while he spent it all on women, fancy hats and his life long addiction to alcohol.

But he also did little things that seem so good. When he was home he’d bring in injured animals he’d find and nurse them back to health. Owls, mountain lions, and raccoons, oh my.

On the other side, while he was a drunk, he was an abusive drunk. He beat my grandmother, the three boys, my uncles and occasionally his daughters, my aunts. And my grandfather wasn’t a little man. He was almost seven feet tall, clown feet, big ears and hands so large and rough that he used to take the turkey out of the oven on thanksgiving with one bare hand. He was an oil field man. Rough, crazy strong, and scary as all get out to people that didn’t know him, and some that did. He kept a shotgun in his truck, and one by his favorite chair in the livening room.

There was a coming of age thing for the men in the family. When you got old enough dad took you out in the backyard and beat the crap out of you to keep you in line. Then he’d kick you out. Most of the kids were out of the house by fourteen.

But he never hit my mother, since she was the baby, when I knew him my grandmother and aunts and uncles were all out of the house. He was just a giant old man who told me stories and let me climb all over him. He was so dark and weather beaten he even looked like an old tree.

He used to buy bikes and fix them up, then give them away to kids in the neighborhood who couldn’t afford them. He always said that every child deserved to have a bicycle. Streamers on the handles, red flag on the back and all.

My mother was always a lot like him. Not the abusive drunk part, but she’s always helping out other kids. It used to bother me a little when I was young. I’d wake up and come downstairs and some neighbor kid that I didn’t even know would be eating my cereal. She’d buy me a toy, and if she saw that a child broke his that day, she’d give him mine. She’d always go buy me that toy again, later that day, and I never went hungry, but as a kid it’s hard to understand. Hard not to be jealous.

The first time it hit me was when I was in pre-kindergarten. I remember the day perfectly. My mother had picked me up from the regular half day of school and had brought me McDonalds for lunch. A Kermit the Frog stuffed animal was the toy. As I was getting in our white van we saw a young boy drop his lunch by accident. Other children stepped on it, squished his sandwich into the ground and you could tell he was about to cry. This time I offered to give my lunch to the kid instead of my mum giving it away. Now it still sucked every time I found some little neighbor kid eating my cereal, playing with my toys, sleeping in my bed, or taking my mom’s attention, but it helped me to understand.

It doesn’t bother me now. I understand why she does it, and a lot of it has to do with how she was treated as a child. She remembers her father giving away bicycles to kids, and remembers when he abandoned her, how she’d have to spend the night at neighbors and eat breakfast with their kids. It took a few years for me to grow up and understand, but now I love it.

Today my father and younger brother went out skiing. My brother invited a bunch of his friends to go along, but many of their families couldn’t afford to pay almost the hundred bucks needed for an entrance fee, or pay to rent skis and snowboards. It didn’t matter. I can just imagine my grandfather saying “every kid should get a chance to ski”.

I took the girls up to my room and gave them sweaters, extra pairs of socks, a warmer coat, and snow pants. My brother and father helped the boys get dressed in some of their other winter clothes. I gave my snowboard to one boy, and my father gave another his old skis. Hats and gloves got passed around before they all ran out the door, and my mother treated them to a day at the ski lodge. Kind of a belated Christmas gift.


There are just some songs I absolutely love-- mostly from the seventies and eighties. I don’t pay that much attention to the lyrics, and I don’t appreciate music on the bases of complexity or difficulty, and I don’t usually pick up on subtle…stuff, but I do know what I like. The tambourine. I’ve been saying it for years and will keep on saying it, they need to bring the tambourine back into popular music! You cannot have a song with a tambourine in it that isn’t wonderful. There’s some sort of law you learn in physics that says so. And, yay, I got one for Christmas.