Grandma Alice and "Skinny"

Like my mother, Alice is someone I'd do anything to talk to as an adult. She was smarter even than Mom and turned me on to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 when I was still nose-deep in comic books. I don't even know her heritage. The man next to her can only be "Skinny," someone Mom spoke of affectionately and often. He got the monicker because he was "skinny as a pole" in his youth but more than made up for it later. Doesn't he look like a great guy? Alice worked for the War Department during WW II; she smoked, she drank, and she didn't take guff from anybody. There were things she tried to tell me after my mother's death, life-things she tried to warn me about, but I was too young to listen.

Isn't it a shame. It takes a lifetime to get on the same page, and by then we are no longer in the same world.