Great Grandpa Al

There's a chance that, if not for a certain mule kicking my great grandfather in the nuts when he was a boy, I would not be alive today.

Allow me to explain.

Before Christmas, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit with my 94-year old great grandfather--my father's mother's father, to rough out the family tree for you. I got him going on some stories, and he's still fairly cogent. He talked about life on a farm in the Sand Hills. I learned that people canned chickens (seriously, people could can meat in the 1920s?). They had tunnels between all the farm buildings so they didn't have to go outside in the winter. And he remembered the first time he saw an automobile. It was driven by a travelling photographer, selling family portraits door to door.

I asked him what he remembered about the first World War. Not much--just a parade at a nearby town when they sent the soldiers off the war. He remembers his father being in that parade.

Next, I asked him about World War II, because I knew he was of age to fight, but hadn't, but I didn't know why. He was turned down each time he tried to sign up because he had a hernia, which he had gotten when he was a boy. He was playing in the barn with a cap gun, and startled a horse. He woke up in bed several days later, considerably swollen in the privates.

This medical condition plagued him from then on. Medicine could not fix the problem at first, and so he lived with it until he was in his 30s, sometimes aggravating it and putting himself in the hospital. Funny, it was a doctor who had received training in the military during World War II who eventually performed surgery and fixed the problem, after the war.

He's outlived my father, and my grandmother, and I suspect he could very well outlive me. I think about all the ways he could have met an untimely end--a lot of boys didn't come home from the war. My grandfather, if he had gone, might not have come back. And so, perhaps my grandmother might not have been born, nor my father, nor me.

Except that getting kicked in the nuts kept him from having to go to war.

It would be hard to write that convincingly in fiction. But it's all true.