Yesterday you might have read an exchange between Guss and me in the comments where I mentioned Mama and Dada.

These were the two fine people who raised us in their older years.

Mama was our grandmother’s sister, our great-aunt. Dada was a full-blooded Mohawk who fell in love with a woman from our tribe, and when she died, he put his children in private school and boarded with our great-grandmother and great-aunt.

I don’t know a day in my life up until the age of 23 when I didn’t have Mama and Dada.

She was the strict one. Sometimes I used to say she’d start hollering from the time her feet hit the floor in the morning until she put them in bed at night, but that’s not true.

She had a sense of humor, but we were held accountable for our mistakes, even if she tried to help us out of any trouble we might have gotten into.

Though she was technically a full-blooded Penobscot Indian, she had the most steely blue eyes that could bore right through you if you were lying to her.

You could tell if Guss was lying because his ears turned red. He doesn’t lie now but his ears turn red when he’s teasing and he is a tease. He used to make me so mad by teasing me and then when I’d go after him he’d take off and play with his friends for the day and I never caught up with him.

Dada went to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, where he learned just about every trade there is. His roommate was Jim Thorpe. Yes, that Jim Thorpe.

So many times I’d hear him talking of Jim Thorpe and never paid attention. I wish I had listened to those anecdotes now.

Dada was hit with a steel beam in construction, and as a result, went deaf and had a broken nose he never got fixed. He had huge hands.

Dada was a teaser too. He’d say something to tease us and then put his hand over his mouth and shake his body laughing quietly.

One evening Guss and I put on boxing gloves and started boxing in the kitchen where Dada hung out.

Surprising myself, I began to beat Guss by getting him near the refrigerator and punching. I can still hear Dada saying, “Atta boy, Sister! Atta boy!” He always called me “Sister” and had a nickname for Guss from the day he first saw him. Guss loved him so much he even smiled at him the first time he met him as an infant.

When it came time for him to get angry enough to think we deserved a spanking he would reach for his belt. It didn’t take more than once for me to realize it was better to take the punishment than to run because it was worse when I got back. When I saw the belt get unbuckled I just leaned over his knees and got my spanking, which, as I recall, was not that serious.

Dada insisted we do our alphabet when we were in kindergarten and to learn how to write our names. Every night we sat at the oak dining room table and went through our exercises. (Despite his best efforts, my handwriting is atrocious.)

Dada was a hard worker and was digging huge trenches in our front yard to fix the plumbing when he was in his sixties and after a long day’s work.

Mama made baskets all day and was also an efficient housekeeper, although making me clean the corners of the stairs to her satisfaction got to be a bit tiresome because I had to re-do them so much. The centers were perfect, but I could never seem to get the corners right or the huge bathroom just right either.

My mother decided she wanted me when I was twelve years old and I moved in with her. I still had the values instilled in me by Mama and Dada and knew I could go to them and talk to them at any time. With Dada I had to put my mouth up to his right ear and tell him in a normal voice what I wanted to say.

Mama had a stroke when she was 73 and her brother put her into a nursing home, where she died five years later.

After I was married I moved out of state, but when my husband went overseas for a year I moved back home and took Dada down to see her at least every other week. He would stop and buy her ginger ale and ice cream.

Watching him pull himself up by the bars on her bed to give her a peck on the cheek made me realize these two wonderful people I loved so much really loved each other too.

They started raising us when they were in their mid to late fifties and early sixties. They didn’t have to do what they did for us, but they did it and they loved us just because.

Today I salute Mama and Dada and I’m sure Guss feels the same.

God broke the mold when He made them.

(Guss, if you take this post down I’m going to come up there and get the boxing gloves out again. )

Written by ~J~

One Response to “A Tribute to Mama and Dada”

1. Guss says:

   July 5, 2007 at 5:47 am

   Thank you.