Stuff We Watched When Grandma Williams Babysat Us In The 60's

Grandma Williams watched us at night when my parents went out of town, but there was one night a week, when we did not want to have her watch us: the night that Lawrence Welk was on television. My sisters did not mind, because as soon as they learned how crazy listening and watching it made me, the automatically became a "must see" experience. But holding two large pillows, one over each ear, actually became a way of developing my upper body strength at an early age. The program after all was 60 minutes in length.

I am so grateful for things she taught me, the drive to learn to be a poet, the encouragement to educate myself, the love of music she taught me as an elementary school teacher; but the Lawrence Welk thing was not something I learned to love. It was like developing a taste for sushi carp caught in the Malad River.

Grandma gave us some classical music LP's one year that I loved. She taught me to appreciate the music of Stephen Douglas and other composers from America's nineteenth century. And most importantly, she not only did music programs that exposed me and other young people to Christmas music, but she also had learn some songs from World War I that we performed for the American Legion War Mothers. I will never forget that, and I will always wish that I could get a copy of the text she used. The music was beautiful, and the people were appreciative and even emotional about our performance. This was probably the thing that awakened me to my interest in music, both in terms of performing and listening.

She was a grandmother who loved music, and her way of loving me was trying to instill that same thing in me too. Everything worked, except of course for the whole Lawrence Welk thing.