Daisy is the “grandparent” I know the least about. She is almost a total enigma: I don’t even know her birth or death dates. Although she was a major factor in raising my dad and my brother and I, I know almost nothing about her life or interests.
Daisy was adamant that no one know her age. So much so that while she was still in the Maryland area and needed gall bladder surgery, she traveled to California to have it done, and in the first decades of the 1900s that was not an insignificant trip! She did this because she didn’t want to be a patient in the hospital she worked at: she was afraid her coworkers might find out how old she was.
Mom remembers she and dad taking Daisy up to visit relatives on the Maryland/Pennsylvania border in the 1940s. She had a sister named Myrna that lived with Nana and Daisy for a while when they were in California and another sister who married and moved out to California as well. There was also a brother somewhere.
As I mentioned in an earlier entry, Daisy moved in with my dad’s mother to help out after Nana got divorced. They lived together from that point on. After Nana died, Daisy seemed to slip out of my life as she was taken care of by her sister’s relatives. I don’t know for sure, but I think she died while I was still at college.
My brother and I always felt that Daisy was a bit of a “sour puss” and not near as much fun as the other grandparents. It was only long after she was gone that I found out from my mother that the reason Daisy never smiled was that she was ashamed of her teeth. That was one reason she never liked having her picture taken, so, of course, my dad made sure to snap as many shots as he could.
Daisy was very conservative in her religion: I remember she didn’t like the fact that as a kid I played solitaire with a regular deck of cards; she called them the “devil’s cards”. And woe betide we kids if we put another book on top of a Bible, or worse, put the Bible on the floor beside us!
Yet, weirdly, I can’t remember either she or Nana going to church. I just asked my mom about it and she has no memory of them doing so either. And yet Daisy was definitely a Seventh-day Adventist.
The only story I ever heard about Daisy’s youth was that she was at a county fair and Charles Lindenbergh was there. This woman who I always knew as conventional and reserved actually went up in a plane with him! If I had been told this as a child, I would have found it inconceivable.
I wish I had had a chance to know this woman after I grew up. I feel I really missed out by not getting to know her.
Tuples and Attributes 