One of my favorite memories of my grandmother is of a time when my brother and I stayed with her during the summer of 1983 or 1984. One day while we were there, we hit the streets of Kansas City to run errands. At one point, standing outside a drug store under the blazing afternoon sun, the subject of Grover Cleveland came up. Yes, the same Grover Cleveland who served as our nation’s president from 1885 to 1889 and again from 1893 to 1897. As the family oddball, I’m sure I brought him up, but I sure wasn’t prepared for my grandma’s response. I only had to utter his name and out of nowhere I was instantly slapped with a sharp and sudden harshness. "He was a terrible president!," she snapped in a loud and bitter voice. I was immediately taken aback. She was truly mad at the man. I forget the conversation that ensued, but the oddness of someone having such strongly emotional opinions about a president who was almost a century dead and gone, and who wasn’t even president during her lifetime, definitely stuck with me.
Years later I asked her about it again, and apparently Grover Cleveland was someone she remembers her parents or grandparents talking about when she was a child. She couldn’t really give me any specifics on why he was such a terrible president. Of course this was totally foreign to me. I can’t understand someone so unquestioningly adopting the opinions of her parents, but in its own way it was endearing and had a certain beauty. No one else may have realized it, but when she passed earlier this year, we lost the last person with intensely personal feelings about the administration of Grover Cleveland. And I personally lost so much more.
I miss you, Grandma.