I don’t talk a great deal about my grandparents. I never knew my paternal grandfather—he was estranged from the grandmother before my dad even met my mother—but the rest I knew. Grandma Tiedemann was a tiny woman who was a dynamo, very proper and yet indulgent of her descendants.
My maternal grandparents I knew very well—we lived downstairs from them for many years. Here’s a photograph I made of Grandpa, some time in the mid Seventies.
He was A Character. Folks knew him as The Colonel. He gardened. He was shamelessly curious. Often he would say exactly what was on his mind, regardless of the situation or the company. Around this time he took to walking three blocks to the local butcher shop, where he would take up a chair by the meat counter and regale people as they came in to buy their lunch meat, steaks, chicken, and sausages, just striking up conversations out of the blue, and managing never, to my knowledge, to offend anyone.
Whatever I may have learned in growing up of tolerance and respect, Grandpa was a large part of the lesson. Not in anything he ever said, but just that fact that in his daily actions he really did see no distinctions between people. Everyone was the same, everyone was unique, everyone had a story. I never once heard him utter a racial epithet of any kind, categorize people according political, religious, or ethnic characteristics, or refuse to be friendly and kind to anyone. He was garrulous, decent, almost always smiling, and he adored my mother. He was a cool old man. (When I was very small I called him Potter, apparently, though I don’t personally recall. Later he was “Grampa.”)
Grandma, on the other hand, was almost exactly the opposite. She was very “Southron” in attitude, quick to put people down (and then forget she’d done it), judge, and complain. There are many things about her that were not admirable.
But Grandpa was devoted to her. I didn’t realize that for a long time, but in retrospect I recall all the telltales of what must have been a blazingly passionate love that had settled into the kind of reliable, ever-present support and trust and care we often hear about but rarely see.
Just wanted to share that.