Ninety Nine

When my son was preparing for the end of his high school days and hedging on whether to go on to college because “four years is a long time”, I told him to go ask his then 96 year old great-grandmother if she thought 4 years was a long time. When my then 75 year old father took a spill on his Harley and wound up in the hospital, the first words he spoke were, “don’t tell my mother”. Obviously, I had to, and with much trepidation, I said to my grandmother, “Gram, I have some bad news about Stan”. Her reply was, “is he in jail again?” That broke the ice and as she so often did, my grandmother made a difficult situation easier, and we actually had a laugh over it, despite its seriousness. Of course my father fully recovered, and is looking at new Harleys as I write this. His mother, my grandmother, Cora Spain, passed away on December 22 at the age of 99 years. So, this last month of the year was a bit sad for me but certainly there is some consolation in that she lived a long good life. I’m sure she is happy to be reunited with her husband, another Stanley Spain, who passed away in 2002 at the age of 96.