I said "Come Ahead Easy"

Out of all my relatives I by far have had most of my interaction with my Uncle Jack (Gray).  He got me a job with the mill he worked at when I stumbled back home after a college try.  He tried to kill me once when we were logging together and I wasn't paying attention to the theory of angles and taught winch cables.  Everytime I forgot to bring something down to Beaver Hollow when we were working on building the campground, we would go up and pillage through Uncle Jack's messy shop till we found what we needed to fix what ever we were working on at the time.

All of Grandma Grays kids helped around the home place from time to time after your great great Grandma Mary got older.  Aunt Jill and Jack North took turns along with your great Grandma Charlie keeping the lawns and weeds mowed down around Grandma Gray's house.  Mom can chime in here about the time she tried to burn the home place down while trying to hack the brambles back one time. Uncle Jack was the only one who stayed down on the home place, built a house, and raised his family, all the while keeping a close eye on Grandma Gray's needs.  Making sure she always had plenty of firewood on hand at all times because Grandma Mary had to keep her house at 98 degrees even during the summer months it seemed.  Uncle Jack would stop in after work every afternoon and check on grandma and bring her more cigarettes.  It's a wonder grandma didn't petrify herself from all the smoking she did.

Yep, now and then my Aunts and Uncle would have spats with each other about this or that but from someone standing on the outside looking in, I am so proud of all of them.  In America we don't do a very good job taking care of our elderly parents in my opinion.  I go on call after call with the fire department where some elderly person is down, laying on their living room floor or better yet lodged between the toilet and wall in their bathroom with their pants down around their knees.  No guardian around keeping an eye on their frail condition.  A lot of times families simply throw the old folks in... yep an old folks home and come and visit them on Christmas.  Towards the end of Grandma Grays life she got a little dingy in the head and it was hard for her to get around in her old house.  Uncle Jack and I came in one weekend and tore a wall out and built a indoor bathroom so grandma wouldn't have to totter down the slick trail leading to the barn board outhouse she had used all her life.  Our family members would take turns staying with grandma especially right at the end when she had to be admitted to a elderly care facility for specialized care.  The afternoon that grandma passed away there was half a dozen relatives standing beside her bed when she went home to be with Grandpa Buster.

My favorite Uncle Jack story...  ... Uncle Jack had this beat up old Jeep, dents everywhere, no hard top on it just a roll bar.  We must have been having some kind of family reunion because I think Aunt Dorothy was even there.  Aunt Dorothy didn't hang around at grandma's as much as her sisters did but I digress.  Uncle Jack decides we all needed to go on our customary rattle snake hunt just as dusk begins to fall over the "home place" that humid summer evening.  The Jeep looked like one of those buses you see pictures of in India where half the people in it are hanging on the outside of the bus and so off we go, dragging bottom at every pothole in the dirt road.  We come to a place where we needed to make a creek crossing so Uncle Jack tells me to crawl out on the hood and make sure the water is not too deep to swamp us.  I crawl out on the overly hot dented hood and tell him looks good, "come ahead easy", that's right before I see the headlights dip under water.  I look back into the cab area of the Jeep just in time to see people scrambling to hand babies up to higher people straddling the roll bar by now.  The engine quickly sputters to a halt as Uncle Jack calmly pulls his wet wallet out of his back pants pocket and hands it to Aunt Jackie as Graves Creek flows through his lap.  We finally carry everybody that needed rescuing to the opposite shore.  In the mean time the guys float the Jeep over to the creek bank and push the front tires up out of the water.  Dirty water is leaking out of every possible hole in the floorboards.  There is no way this machine is going to run again tonight, as real darkness creeps over us but Uncle Jack tries to turn the engine over anyways.  I'll be darn if the motor didn't cough, smoking to a start as Uncle Jack quickly orders us all back aboard so we can try and limp back home before the motor dies for real. 

I don't know why everybody blamed me for the calamity, I told Uncle Jack to "come ahead easy".  Later we found out that some rogue gold miner had dredged a deep hole right where we had to forge Graves Creek that unforgettable rattle snake hunt.  Times like this are the fondess of all my memories I have of being a part of the Gray family.