The Ghost Was Surprised
My sister and I, along with our three cousins on the Slovak side of the family, always called our Grandmother “Gramichee”. I wrote a reminiscence of her, but this is a story about her mother whom I vaguely remember meeting once when I was probably four or five years old. She had immigrated to the US from what is now the country of Slovakia in 1901 at the age of 46. I know next to nothing about her except for what follows.
She was a small woman who had to have been in her mid-eighties when I met her. I had been carefully coached to greet her in the Slovak language. I remember the words but don’t know the correct spelling. Phonetically, it sounded like this: Hello Stah-renka, yahk-sah-mah-te? It would translate as “Hello, Grandmother, how are you?” She smiled, broadly, and replied (again phonetically) Doh-bra, doh-bra, See-noch-ku (“Good, good, Sonny.”); the “R”s were rolled off the tongue, not pronounced in the English manner.
She must have been a feisty woman with a good sense of humor at least that was the way I saw her when my father related this story many years later.
My father’s family was living in a third floor apartment at the time when he and his older brother were adolescents; Dad was the middle child (one of five kids), his brother was two years older. My grandmother had separated from my grandfather and I think that her mother was living with the family… helping with the kids and cooking while my grandmother worked. One day, as Dad told it, he and his brother were out on the back porch with a BB gun shooting at who knows what, just doing what brothers do. Their grandmother must have taken note but said nothing. She did, however, concoct a little charade that was meant to scare the boys.
She got a large potato and carved a set of ferocious looking fangs from it which she fitted into her mouth. She then found an old white sheet and went into the kitchen where she wet her face, blew into the flour bin so that her face was covered with the white stuff, and draped the sheet over her head fastening it under her chin so that it covered her body. I bet she made a fine looking ghost as she headed toward the porch while making otherworldly sounds.
It seems that things did not work exactly as planned because Dad’s brother, no doubt startled by the apparition in the doorway, promptly shot her. The BBs couldn’t have done any damage, especially through the loose sheet, but they had to have stung her a bit.
I’ve always wondered about what happened to the boys immediately afterward, they might have been stung in a different way. Dad never related that.
F.A. Zedik
08-21-07