The Time Machine

The Time Machine Jeffrey Hammond When I was in high school in the mid-sixties, I became personaUy acquainted with Frank "Husk" Chance, manager/first baseman for the world champion Chicago Cubs. Never mind that I lived in a smaU Ohio town, that the Cubs last won aWorld Series in 1908, or that Frank Chance had been dead for forty years. The fact that I knew him was fuUy consistent with changes that came to our family when our grandparents moved in. At first Henry and Susan Weldon stayed with their two daughters only a few weeks each year, usuaUy during summers or at Christmas, always returning to their bungalow in a tiny IUinois town across the border from Terre Haute, Indiana. My mother and her sister began to worry, though, after Grandpa nearly severed a finger with a jigsaw. Grandma hadn't driven for years and the nearest hospital was thirteen miles away, so she simply bandaged him up and sent him to bed until the bleeding stopped. This was only the latest in a series ofmisadventures, and after my mother spent several months of difficult phone caUs trying to convince her parents that they could no longer manage on their own, they finaUy agreed to move in with us as long as it wasn't "permanent." He was eighty-seven and she was eighty-four. Henry and Susan Weldon looked like elderly Americans from central casting, benign versions ofthat stifffarm couple in GrantWood's American Gothic. Grandpa was a rail-thin, dignified man who had made his living seUing dry goods and fabrics on the road and in a series ofsmaU-town stores in Minnesota and IUinois. On his good days he looked Uke an older Woodrow Wilson. On bad days, after he hadn't slept weU, he looked more Uke the mummy of Ramses the Great. Good day or bad, he faced each morning with a clean plaid shirt buttoned to the chin, replaced on Sundays with a white shirt and a tie. He smeUed like Twenty Mule Team Borax, his favorite soap. Grandma, whom Grandpa always addressed as "Mother," was more even-tempered and did not seem to have bad days. Sweet-faced and 10 Jeffrey Hammond11 white-haired, she was a serious Methodist who dispensed biblical wisdom whenever she deemed it appropriate. She wore floral print dresses, clunky black shoes, and an apron whether she was cooking or not. She smeUed like lilacs. When they moved in, Mom told my sister and me that our customary bouts of teenage sullenness were no longer acceptable. She had no interest in having her mother think she had raised a pack of untutored brutes. For us kids, the burden of having to put on company manners, formerly reserved for rare occasions, hadjust expanded to encompass our entire days. Once our grandparents moved in they were inescapably there, always watching us with blandly curious expressions that we read as judgmental. My sister , five years older than me and obsessed with dating, complained that their presence gave her the creeps. Despite Mom's assurances that they were only making conversation, Sue felt that they were keeping oppressively close tabs on her when they asked—as they invariably did—where she was going whenever she headed for the door. With my duUer social life, I had it easier . My only real sacrifice was having to give up playing my drums after school, because that was when Grandma's "stories"—The Guiding Light and The Edge ofNight—came on. I was the only drummer in the marching band who had caUoused knees from practicing cadences on their muted, bony surfaces. Our parents had to make changes, too. My father was forced to curb his longstanding and, I thought, very funny habit ofcursing, which he did even when he wasn't mad. He also gave up his customary beer with dinner, settling for a bottle or two downed furtively at night out in the garage, far from Grandma's stiU-sharp sense of smell. Our mother, I later realized, had to make the most drastic adjustments, forced as she was to relinquish a considerable amount of household control in an uneasy balance of...