Dad: I never asked him, but I think the kids would've called him Papa Ruppe'. Once he was offered a very high-paying job, but it meant traveling too much. He wanted to be there for us. His whole life, I don't think he ever talked down to me.
Uncle James: He played trumpet, professionally when he was younger. When we were little, we believed he decorated every house in town except ours. I don't know where that came from. He was almost deaf by then time I knew him. When he watched the Three Stooges, it sounded like a gunfight.
Pardner: That was my grandfather. He called everyone Pardner, and everyone called him Pardner. He bet on the horses, and taught us kids to play poker. "Don't tell your mother," was his favorite line. He went nearly blind. He laughed all the time. He loved Johnny Bench and the Cincinnati Reds.
Baby: My Aunt Ruby (who we called "Baby") loved to cook. She made the best jumbalaya ever. Sometimes, she would to our house to make some. She'd constantly be thinking she screwed up. She never did. When I went to college, she asked what kind of slop they had there.
Nana: My grandmother wanted to be a Southern Ladies. She even married Rhett Butler (see Pardner above). Only it wasn't 1860. She got every doctor in town to prescribe her Valium for her nerves. She liked it when I played "You Light Up My LIfe" on the piano.
Uncle Wade: He was Dad's brother. Uncle Wade was a fireman. We went camping once, and it rained buckets. We used to have fun with him, and say he brought the rain. One time we were driving by his house, and I swear there was a little black cloud hovering over it.
This work by Timothy H. Ruppel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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