Journal: July 20

What I remember about my grandfather Hunter, my father’s father, who died in 1960, was that whenever we were riding in the car with him, he would fall asleep. I have no idea why he would have been sitting in the back seat with us, or why, if he were sitting in the back seat, he would be sitting in the middle, but my memory, faulty as it is, is of us setting out somewhere and my bulky grandfather sitting between my brother and me, and him falling asleep.

The seats of cars in those days were covered with a prickly sort of fabric, and when Grandfather and Grandmother were around, it was summer. He was a Presbyterian minister in Berkeley, California, but he served as the summer pastor, a few years, in the church in Vermont where my aunts (Grandmother’s sisters) lived, and where my parents now live. So it was summer when we saw them most — we lived in Massachusetts and went up to visit the aunts from time to time. It was hot in the car — there wasn’t air conditioning then — and that prickly fabric of the seat cut into my bare legs, and then Grandfather would fall asleep and begin to list, either in my direction or Graham’s. If in mine, soon he would be leaning on me, making me hotter still. I pushed back and sometimes would make him tip the other way, onto Graham, whom I fought with all the time. Then Graham pushed, and Grandfather was soon slumping in my direction again.

Grandfather Hunter did not have a way with children. He was portly, and bald, with what hair remained a fringe of white around the sides of his head, and black hairs straying out his nose and alarming salt & pepper eyebrows that bristled. One brow’s hair shot up and the other didn’t, so he always looked as though he were asking a question, though he wasn’t. I guess he had a sense of humor. His mouth had a humorous twist to it, but it was lost on me. He was a minister, and you never forgot that.