Everything was so quiet.  Just Grandpa slurping his hot coffee after milking the cows and before doing other chores or going to work in the mines.  And Grandma cooking, cleaning, and doing her outside chores.  Not even a radio.  No neighbor children.  And to multiply the quiet, at the time we lived in a very densely populated urban neighborhood of married university students which translates as “children in every home.”

I helped weed their huge garden (ugh!). I fed the chickens. I helped Grandma make potica just like she did in the old country.  But I was bored.  Lonely.

About once a week, Grandpa went to town in his 1946 Chevrolet pick-up truck.  “Town” had one main street with a grocery store, a liquor store next door to a variety store, a school with an iron mine behind it, a town hall, and a Chevrolet garage.

Grandma told me to go with Grandpa.  She gave me some money and said she wanted me to go to the variety store and buy something to play with.  She told Grandpa to help.

Grandpa didn’t help.  He just dropped me off and said he’d be back to pick me up in a half hour.  Old men were sitting outside the liquor store.  The sidewalk was heavily  pocked with wads of chewing tobacco that had been hurled from between their teeth.  In addition to bored and lonely, I now felt small and defenseless.

I slowly eased my way into the variety store.  I was the only customer so the store was very quiet, too.  SO now, in addition to bored, lonely, small, and defenseless, I felt watched.  I desperately looked around for something to buy.  I didn’t see anything that really fit.  But that was what Grandma had told me to do and I most certainly didn’t want to disappoint her.  Finally, I bought a pencil, a writing tablet, and some penny candy.

When we got back to the farm, Grandma asked what I had bought.  When she saw my goodies, she went into a rage.  First, spending money on candy was a big no-no.  But also, she said something like, “We have paper and pencils here!  You didn’t need to spend money on those!  I meant for you to buy something like a coloring book and crayons or a game.”

Well, I now add devastated to the list of what I felt.  Just imagine.  Here was the person I most admired, most loved, more angry than I had ever seen her before.

Thus, in spite of that long list of feelings, lonely was what stood out the most.   If I had felt lonely before that, I now had a whole new standard for what lonely means.  It hurt.  A lot.  It was ever so much more scary than boredom or quiet or being small and defenseless or being watched.  It was about feeling disapproved of, rejected, and isolated. By Grandma!

Of course, from where I sit today as I write this, I imagine that she really was mad at Grandpa. (…and probably for a lot more than just this one time that, in her eyes, he had, once again, let her down.  Yet, and still, there was not question that, when all was said and done…as it eventually was…they loved each other.)