Nana

 Nana was born in 1888 and was a live in caregiver for me. She was my mother's mother and we called her "Nana" to keep her straight from Grandpa and Grandma who lived next door in Lake Forest Park near Seattle Washington then when I was up to 4 years old in 1952.

I was trying to place here in relation to the "Flappers" of the 1920s and was very surprised when I started calculating that she would have been 20 in 1908. She was born in Philadelphia, one of 12 Scottish Children of Scottish parents who own their own home there. However, their house burned down I guess around 1900 maybe and this ruined their parents financially because most people didn't have house insurance back then and also fires were much more prevalent then because of candles and gas lamps etc. for lighting. Everyone hadn't moved over to electric lights yet and refrigerators were still mostly "literally Ice boxes" where people bought ice to keep food fresher.

My NANA talked with a Scottsh Brogue like the rest of her brothers and sisters because their parents were originally from Scotland. Nana married in Scotland as she lived in Clydebank after she was 12 years old when her house burned down in Philadelphia. She married a man from Ayre Scotland which is also just south of Glasgow, Scotland while in Scotland. He was living in Boston with his mother and father when his father went to get medicine for him when he was sick then in Boston one winter and his father got pneumonia from going to get the medicine for his 8 year old son and died of pneumonia. I guess life was pretty tough then. 

So, my mother's father had to move back to Scotland too to grow up. 

Then my Nana married him and then they moved to Omaha, Nebraska from near Glasgow Scotland where other brothers and sisters of Nana had moved and were working at the newspaper there. My grandfather went to the Moody Institute of Chicago to become a Methodist minister too I guess while he was here at first in the U.S. as an adult. I think likely Nana stayed in Omaha while this happened because I think she had the three girls while living there including my mother in 1919. So, that would mean that she was 31 years old when my mother, the youngest of three girls was born.

They stayed in Seattle after that and when my mother was 18 her father left and never returned so my mother being the youngest girl was expected to financially support herself and her mother so she did by working making shoes and pocketbooks until she got a better job as a telephone operator for Bell Telephone. She worked part time at Bell telephone even in California when we moved there in 1952. We moved first to San Diego area where we lived in Vista and El Cajon the first year or two we were there. I would have been 4 and 5 years old and went to two different grade schools one in Vista and one in El Cajon then. By 1st Grade we had moved to Tujunga where I went to Pinewood Elementary school where my parents had been put in charge of a mystical Christian Church in downtown Los Angeles. Eventually, we moved when i was 8 year old to Glendale because they could get to the church in only about 20 minutes to 1/2 an hour on the freeways depending upon the traffic.

I used to as a 5 and 6 year old like to listen to Fibber McGee and Molly and Gildersleave on the radio because we didn't get a black and white TV until it was late 1954. It was only a 17 inch black and white TV but this changed my mother's and my and Nana's life a lot after that. I loved Maverick and the Wonderful World of Disney and other cowboy shows like jim Bowie and "The Rifleman" back then too.

Later I liked Star Trek and Bewitched and programs like this too. Sometimes I watched "Twilight zone" but it was pretty scary sometimes and I might have bad dreams between 8 and 12 years old. I didn't do well with scary stuff because I was already an intuitive even then and was telepathic too.

For me, there was never any real barrier between the physical and the spiritual realms of life. For many people "The other side" is just theoretical but for me the physical world directly interconnects to the spiritual world for better or for worse depending upon the situation.

However, the other side of this is I tend to survive anything because of my perceptions whereas people who ONLy believe in the physical I watch die around me a lot because they often are not aware of what they are really dealing with in that situation.

Some people say: "Ignorance is bliss". However, my point of view here at 73 is: "If you cannot see beyond the physical you can literally die from things you don't believe are real." And I watch this happen all the time.  It's kind of a helpless feeling when you know people are going to die and there might be nothing you can do to stop it.

Nana took care of me and always lived with us until I was 12 or 13 and then my parents put her in an old folks home in her 70s. However, she couldn't manage her meds and often overdosed there so they brought her back to live with us instead of watching her die or go through bad things from medicines she didn't understand.

Finally in Poway I think it was I was going to Palomar College around 1971. She was in her 80s by then and Mom and Dad realized that they just couldn't take care of her very well anymore so they sent her to live with Mom's two other sisters in Seattle where she lived until she was 90 and passed away there in Seattle.

Mom and I were driving to Seattle to say goodbye to her in two separate cars then in 1978 in the summer. I would have been exactly 30 years old and was driving in my 1976 Toyota Blue Long bed Truck and my son was with us who would have been 4 years old then. I might have had my 6 pack cabover camper on it too then. But, I felt Nana pass away when we got within about 500 miles away from Seattle. At the time at first I thought I was going crazy but later I realized that Nana had come to me to say goodbye and it was very bittersweet because I would never get to say goodbye to her in person. But, life is the way it is:

By God's Grace