Grammy’s store
My grandmother handed me a nickel, pointed toward the road, and sent me to buy an ice cream cone at a store named Grammy’s.
I was 4 1/2 years old.
It was a hot, humid summer night, the kind where the porch screen door sticks and even the neighbors’ dogs are too tired to bark. The memory has stayed with me all these years.
Shortly after I was born, we had moved into my mother’s parents’ house. My grandfather had suffered a stroke and needed around-the-clock care, and my mother, the youngest of eight children with the youngest kids, became the natural choice to provide it.
Life had already dealt my parents a few hard blows. My twin brothers had died shortly after birth, and my father, a railroad fireman training to become an engineer, had been badly injured in a train accident that broke his back. A new surgical procedure at Magee Hospital in Pittsburgh kept him from being paralyzed, but he spent nearly two years bedridden. By this time, my grandfather had passed away, and my father had begun a new career as a door-to-door life insurance salesman. Our lives were slowly beginning to resemble something that was struggling toward normal.
What I remember most from that time, however, is this one summer night. For reasons I no longer recall, my older brother was away, probably spending his first week of summer with my father’s parents. My parents had some grown-up plans of their own, and they left me behind with my grandmother.
Grandma Beeson had already raised eight children and by the time I came along, she was understandably done. She shuffled around the house in bedroom slippers and a house dress, rarely went anywhere, and took what our family called “nerve medicine.” She was quiet, newly diabetic, and kind, in a practical, no-hugging sort of way. I sat beside her in her easy chair watching Liberace or Lawrence Welk, our evening ritual.
That night, I waved goodbye as my parents left and promptly sat down on the front porch step, crying. Hard. After a few minutes, the front door opened.
“Nicky,” Grandma said, “here’s a nickel. Go to Grammy’s store and get yourself an ice cream cone.”
No hug. No consolation. No instructions. Just a nickel.
Grammy’s store wasn’t across the street. At my age, it might as well have been in a suburb of Pittsburgh. I had been there before with my parents, but never alone.
I stood up with that nickel tightly covered in my tiny fist and began the long walk up Water Street. When I reached the Murphys’ house, a converted log cabin, there was a narrow alley with a strip of grass down the middle. I followed it to the main road, Route 119. There, pressed against the two-lane highway, sat Grammy’s store, all 500 square feet of it.
Inside was a child’s happy place: penny candy, nickel candy bars, balsa-wood airplanes, and caps for cap guns. But I went straight for the ice cream counter.
Grammy herself was about 4-foot-11. Her last name was McManus, but everyone just called her Grammy. Before we moved into my grandparents’ house, my family had rented a small house behind hers. I asked for a chocolate ice cream cone. She smiled, scooped two generous mounds of chocolate onto a cone, took my nickel, and sent me on my way.
By the time I got home, I had completely forgotten why I had been crying. That ice cream cone healed my broken heart, filled my stomach, and gave me a strange new feeling I had never experienced before.
It was the first time I had ever gone anywhere alone. And for a small boy on a humid summer night, it felt like crossing the state and coming back a little more grown up.
Looking back, it may have been the cheapest life lesson I ever received, and it only cost a nickel.
Nick Jacobs is from Windber.