Remembering Grandpa Waight

Lassy and Timmy’s weekly Sunday night adventures left me breathless with excitement, but my grandfather never knew. Head relaxed against the back of his blue lounge chair, mouth slightly opened, eyes closed, he slept through most episodes. Occasionally, he would stay awake and go to the walk-in closet beneath the stairs to the bedrooms, pull the cord on the light bulb, lift the floor door hiding the cellar stairs and get a bowl of apples from a basket stored in the cool cellar. His hand with the missing index tip turned the apples round and round as strips of red and white apple skins fell back into the bowl. He would core and quarter the apples and serve them along with my grandmother’s popcorn.
Because died when I was still in grade school, that is pretty much all that I remember of my grandfather, except his sporadic visits to our house in his truck. Every now and then he would show up at our house and unload either a 50 pound burlap bag filled with potatoes or a bushel basket of red delicious apples or golden peaches. I thought he always made the rounds of country farms selling fresh produce from the back of his covered pick-up truck.
I reminisced about that recently with my aunt who moved onto the family farm when my grandparents retired from farming. She said she vaguely remembered the produce, but mostly remembered that he used his truck to haul animals to the weekly auction. She especially remembered the pigs:
Shortly before they took over the farm, the year she was pregnant with her second child, my grandfather was raising hogs and pigs that he allowed to roam the hills and woods of the hundreds of acres of the up-state New York farm. She still sounded astonished at the idea as when she talked with me about it recently. Every week grandpa would load up the back of his truck with milk cans and go down to the milk factory to get whey to feed the pigs.
She said she was out in the field shocking the wheat one afternoon when he returned with a load of whey. “He came down that long lane in that rickety old truck driving as fast as he could to get to the barn and the feeding troughs before the pigs.” At the sound of the truck and the cans, the pigs had a predictable Pavlovian response: they perked up and began racing to the barn, from all over the farm My aunt said, “I had to hide behind a tree to get out of their way. It was a stampede.”
The truck not only hauled whey to the pigs, it also hauled pigs away to the market. She said Grandpa would gather up as many pigs and hogs as he could catch, load them on the truck and take them to the auction where he always had a goo visit with other farmers. Contrary to my memory of the silent, sleeping grandfather, my aunt said he always enjoyed a good visit.
Even after he retired, he continued visit the area farms and haul animals to the auction in the back of his pick-up truck. He was doing just that the day my uncle received “the call.” My aunt said he had loaded up a couple calves and was talking with the farmer when a massive heart attack dropped him to the ground. He literally “died with his boots on.” Folks from far and wide came to the funeral home for a last visit.
Perhaps it was because I missed him, but watching Lassy and Timmy was never the same after that.