Even though my parents had been divorced and I had zero contact with my father, who had moved to the Omaha area and then Iowa, my two grandmothers had always been, and remained, rather close friends.
Because I would spend weeks with Lill and Lee at the farm in Sparta during the summers, there were times when Lill would drop me off to visit Grandma Clara and other times when Clara would visit us all at the farm.
My dad's brother, Donley, lived in Iowa somewhere and perhaps that had some influence on my dad's moving there. I don't know for sure.
Clara had a daughter as well as the two boys, however, and she and her husband lived right in Sparta probably not more than a mile from where Lill and Lee had lived before buying the farm.
Aunt Lorraine, like my Uncle Donk, had a bunch of kids. It was as though Clara's three children had declared a contest to see who could have the biggest family, and my dad lost badly.
Aunt Lorraine was a very sweet person and my mother and her were quite close early on. Aunt Lorraine's husband was named John, I believe, and I cannot remember ever meeting him. I do not think I ever was with anyone who actually visited Lorraine at her house, but sometimes Lorraine would accompany Grandma Clara to visit Lill at the farm, and sometimes one or two of her older children, would come along as well.
Lorraine's oldest was named John but was called "Jack". He was a few months older than me. His younger brother Tony was a bit younger than I was. I liked them both, but in reality they were both far ahead of me in maturity, as were their sisters Betsy and Barb. There were more children to come but I would not be around Sparta and somewhat of a divide took place.
This divide was destined to take me far from any contact with either of my sets of grandparents and I would even be unaware of Grandpa Dudley's death when the time came.
As years went on Lorraine's younger children would be born. Some I had contact with, such as Patrick and some I don't believe I met until adulthood, such as Mary, and DJ I do not think I ever have met at all. I am also unclear as to when Lorraine's husband John left--whether he passed away or whether they divorced. Since I was an only child to begin with, this was a great loss to me but I didn't realize it at the time, partially because of my mother's life being in turmoil.
Later, when I would visit Grams (Clara), she would, with great excitement, try and fill me in on what CC was doing, what Betsy was doing, Barb had a boyfriend, DJ got a wonderful report card, and so forth. She was always so positive about them and doubtless she told them that she had had a visit from John Lee. She would call me John Lee. I was only Jiggs or Jiggsy to relatives on my mother's side.
I had a lot of confusion because, after all, I was just a child, and she was talking about cousins from both Donley and Lorraine, as though I would have that all down, which I didn't at the time.
I have a lot of my mother's writings, stories she recollected about her youth written at a later age. Some of them are quite wonderful, but a lot of them expose an emotional and maturational impasse which she ran up against. I recognize it in myself when I look back at my youth.
My mother was emotionally stuck at an early high school level and she fell back to that level in her relationships with others all her life. She perceived, even as an adult, other women as competitors for male attention and she would be very aggressive toward them. This would occur with her sisters as well as colleagues in the workplace and I will discuss it as I go along. It was quite tragic since she tended to see other women as enemies.
Lorraine and a few of my mother's partying friends were exempt from that fixation, because they were not a threat to male attention, not that my mother couldn't find that if the situation presented itself. My mother always spoke fondly of Lorraine; I cannot remember her ever saying anything bad about her. I think that for a short period of time, after the war, Donley, Lorraine, my father, and my mother and her siblings constituted a group of fairly close friendship, visiting one another's parents and going out to party.
The nice picture of Aunt Lorraine shown here was pirated from her daughter, Betsy's, Facebook page. I saw her on and off over the years and as she got old her voice began to sound exactly like Grandma Clara's. Perhaps it always did, but I only noticed it later. She had the same passive calmness about things that Clara did--the same accepting philosophical approach.
When Aunt Lorraine arrived, a few years ago, at her final illness and was at the care center north of Sparta I went to visit her. She was reeling from her illness and I thought that perhaps she was only responding to me out of habit and that she might not even recognize me. After all, I wasn't in her everyday life very much.
When she appeared very tired and it was time to go, I hugged her and told her goodbye and that I loved her. "I love you too, Jiggs," was her reply.
There is more than a little liklihood that Aunt Lorraine thought that it was her brother, my father, that had visited, and he, like Uncle Donley, had preceeded her in death.
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