The dude's been dead for 30 years, so where-ever he reads this blog I'm sure he's having a good laugh.
We're loading up my truck with basement detritus when one of the cousins comes out with a stack of magazines. "I didn't know they had naked wrestling in the Olympics."
I took a look.
Whoa! They might call it wrestling, honey, but that ain't the Olympics...
I've never been much of a porn consumer, gay or otherwise, but I'm guessing nude wrestling magazines from the 40's and 50's would attract a decent dollar in the collector market. Way more than the old Time and Life magazines.
Crazy how you can walk through the remnants of an up-standing citizen's life when they're gone and discover that they were way more than you thought. Bernie was indeed a respected and upstanding citizen. He was also a gay porn aficionado. And somebody in that house had a very healthy appetite for pills and booze...
But enough about that.
Bernie comes alive in that nursing home. In fact, it took mere weeks to find a new love! That revelation was initially received with good humour by the extended family. "Oh how lovely that he has some companionship in his twilight years" and all that sort of thing.
Then he bought the bitch a thousand dollar fur coat!..
WELL HOLY THUNDERIN' JEEZUS IF THAT WASN'T THE END OF THE WORLD!!!
She was obviously a tramp and a gold-digger and by God if this was gonna be the way he carries on there would not be a red cent left over for anybody when the old coot kicked the bucket!
Unfortunately the last months of Grampa Bernie's life were consumed with frantic family desperately running interference between him and the gold-digger.
He dropped dead half way through a Leafs game on CBC one Saturday night.
As many of us wish we could when the Leafs are playing on Saturday night.
I suppose you could say his dreams came true!
In spite of the machinations of his heirs, the new gal got to keep the coat.
Showing posts with label Barnard McMahon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barnard McMahon. Show all posts
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Friday, November 15, 2013
A hundred pictures of Jesus; Grampa's secrets III
Grampa McMahon does OK at the funeral of his wife of 60 years.
Goes home and shuts down.
By "shuts down" I mean he went back to the home he had shared with his Heintzman girl for sixty years. Stopped eating. Stopped drinking. Stopped looking after himself.
Stopped living.
They found him on the floor in a coma a week later. All but dead. Had a leg amputated just to keep him alive.
Put him in a home.
The dreamer and the Weston's VP had different ideas on how to handle Bernie.
But they finally agreed that he belonged in a "home".
Bernie goes to a home, and the rest of us set about clearing out the house.
I was the only family member with a truck, so I was front and centre for the clean-up.
For many years no visitors to the McMahon household had been permitted beyond the front room. The front room had plastic on the couch cushions and a picture of Jesus on the wall.
Finally we were able to get past the front room.
Pictures of Jesus everywhere.
Egg cartons and newspapers and magazines everywhere, once you got past the front room.
They were big-time hoarders.
You got down to the basement, and besides the newspapers and magazines piled so high you could barely navigate your way through, there were hundreds if not thousands of empty gin bottles.
And pill bottles.
Apparently these pillars of the catholic community had spent the last fifty years ginned up, pilled up, and generally fucked up as they dictated morality to the rest of the community, as devout Catholics are wont to do.
I made five or six trips to the Cambridge landfill with the box of my pick-up truck filled with old magazines. I took hundreds and thousands of Life, Look, Time, and Newsweek magazines from the 30's to the 70's to the landfill, as well as thousands of empty pill and liquor bottles.
Not two weeks later I was walking through the Stone Road Mall, and a bunch of nostalgia merchants had set up their kiosks in the place. They were selling magazines from the 30's on up, from five bucks on up.
It suddenly occurred to me that in the past month I'd taken a couple of million dollars worth of nostalgia to the landfill...
...more soon.
Goes home and shuts down.
By "shuts down" I mean he went back to the home he had shared with his Heintzman girl for sixty years. Stopped eating. Stopped drinking. Stopped looking after himself.
Stopped living.
They found him on the floor in a coma a week later. All but dead. Had a leg amputated just to keep him alive.
Put him in a home.
The dreamer and the Weston's VP had different ideas on how to handle Bernie.
But they finally agreed that he belonged in a "home".
Bernie goes to a home, and the rest of us set about clearing out the house.
I was the only family member with a truck, so I was front and centre for the clean-up.
For many years no visitors to the McMahon household had been permitted beyond the front room. The front room had plastic on the couch cushions and a picture of Jesus on the wall.
Finally we were able to get past the front room.
Pictures of Jesus everywhere.
Egg cartons and newspapers and magazines everywhere, once you got past the front room.
They were big-time hoarders.
You got down to the basement, and besides the newspapers and magazines piled so high you could barely navigate your way through, there were hundreds if not thousands of empty gin bottles.
And pill bottles.
Apparently these pillars of the catholic community had spent the last fifty years ginned up, pilled up, and generally fucked up as they dictated morality to the rest of the community, as devout Catholics are wont to do.
I made five or six trips to the Cambridge landfill with the box of my pick-up truck filled with old magazines. I took hundreds and thousands of Life, Look, Time, and Newsweek magazines from the 30's to the 70's to the landfill, as well as thousands of empty pill and liquor bottles.
Not two weeks later I was walking through the Stone Road Mall, and a bunch of nostalgia merchants had set up their kiosks in the place. They were selling magazines from the 30's on up, from five bucks on up.
It suddenly occurred to me that in the past month I'd taken a couple of million dollars worth of nostalgia to the landfill...
...more soon.
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