I was lucky to know three of my four grandparents. I didn’t know my mother’s father but that’s because she didn’t know him. She never met him. The man she thought was her father died before I was born so I never knew him either.

My mother’s mother was Margaret Alger. She was a bit of a scary woman, prone to sudden rages and long-held grudges. She had 11 children with 6 different men. She was married to Bill Duclos when my mother was born but my mother’s biological father was someone named Lessard. I don’t know his first name. Margaret was apparently the life of the party when she was drinking. She had a good singing voice and loved to have a good time. She made delicious apple pies and could fashion a meal out of meager ingredients. She was a large woman, weighing over 400 pounds when she went into the hospital before she died at age 66. She was born in 1920 and raised in New Hampshire on land that is now owned by St. Anselm College. Her family gave much of that land to the Catholic church. (Writing this led me down a rabbit hole of research to see if I could figure out when this happened. I haven’t found anything yet but I will ask my parents for some details. Update: my parents don’t know either. I think I will visit the St. A’s archives sometime soon. Another project!) She aspired to be a writer and was drinking buddies with Grace Metalious, the infamous author of Peyton Place. Margaret was a challenging woman. If you did something she didn’t like, she might stop talking to you for years, as she did with my mother when I was about a year old. I was 9 or 10 when she reconciled with my mother, but some scary memories from an earlier attempted reconciliation made me keep my distance. By the time she really entered my consciousness as a grandparent, she was mostly a shut-in. She lived in an apartment in Goffstown in a building my parents owned and so we would see her regularly when I was in high school. She could hardly walk from her bed to the kitchen in those years and I was too busy living my own life to be very curious about hers. When she died, I was given her “papers.” I was touched that among them was a scrapbook into which she pasted every article I wrote for the Goffstown News. (I wrote a weekly column about girls’ sports when I was in high school.) I had never felt that she paid much attention to me as one of her 20 grandchildren, but here was proof that she did.

My father’s parents were Henry and June. That’s what he called them: Henry and June. I don’t know why.

Henry Benjamin LeBlanc was born in Manchester, NH on January 3, 1915. From what people have told me, he was the black sheep of his family. I don’t really know what that meant to his family but I knew him as a smoker and a drinker and a gambler. He was also funny and charming and loved to have a good time. As my father was growing up, Henry was a traveling salesman and so was often away from home. Later in life, he worked as an electrician for my father. As I was growing up, he lived in a cottage on Rye Beach with his long-time girlfriend Chris McDonald. I have no idea how they met but I loved spending time with them at the beach. We visited often. After Chris had a stroke, they sold the cottage in Rye and moved to Holiday, Florida, where they lived in a house owned by my parents. Chris died before Henry (I called him Grampa) and at some point in Florida, he lost his driver’s license due to DUI and so rode a 3-wheeled bike around. He even got stopped for drunk driving on his bike! The last time I saw him was a few months before he died of an abdominal aortic embolism. I think that was in 1989. (I hate that I can’t remember what year he died.) We went to his favorite restaurant and he bought me and my girlfriend steak dinners. He ordered some food for himself but he didn’t eat much of it. Instead, he drank some Manhattans and told funny stories. We had a good time.

My father’s mother was June Esther Akerly LeBlanc, born in Leominster, MA on April 29, 1918. She moved to a chicken farm in Goffstown, NH with her parents and older sister when she was less than two weeks old. Goffstown was a very small town and when she was the only student in the 7th grade, she was promoted to the 8th grade, skipping 7th altogether. She told me that she felt that this was a mistake as she never caught up and blamed herself. She thought she was dumb. After she graduated from high school when she had just barely turned 17, she began working in a “beauty parlor” as a hairdresser. She was a very hard worker and had a regular clientele of women who had their hair done every week. Eventually, she bought the beauty parlor in the center of Goffstown and my brother and I would visit her there often. Even after she sold the beauty parlor (to a relative), she continued to work there until she was 60 when she retired.

She and my grandfather married in July 1938. Their first son, Arthur George (Butch) was born in January 1939 followed by the twins, Marvin Eulas and Melvin Elwood, in May 1942. Luckily, she had help from my great-great-aunt Nita to raise the boys because she worked a lot. When my father was about 8, she and my grandfather built a house on New Boston Road. They did most of the work themselves. In 1963, after 25 years of marriage, she divorced my grandfather. I have always thought that was a brave thing to do in those days. She never remarried although she had quite a few boyfriends when I was a kid and I think she was quite flirty. She reconnected with her high school boyfriend, Charlie Harris, and they lived together for years until his death in 1984.

My grandmother loved to travel, which I find interesting for someone who lived her entire life (other than winters in Florida for about 20 years) within a 5-mile radius. Maybe that is the reason she loved to travel so much. For example, she and Charlie drove across the United States in 1981. She visited Hawaii and Alaska and most (all?) of the states in the lower 48. She visited many countries with friends and family. She went to Canada, Costa Rica, Panama, Argentina, Mexico, Morocco, Spain, England, Scotland, Wales, France, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. Those are the countries I can remember and I feel as though I have missed some. I think I get my love of travel from her.

Gram had a terrible sense of direction and would get lost quite often. She told a story about traveling with her friends Helen and Cliff to the Austrian Alps. They took a train trip to a village at the top of a mountain and were supposed to meet their traveling group at a specific time to take the train back down the mountain. She somehow got separated from Helen and Cliff and then got lost so she missed the train. Helen and Cliff assumed she had gotten on the train and only discovered she was missing when they got to the bottom of the mountain. They arranged a trip back up the mountain to look for her but in the meantime, she had figured out another way to get to the bottom. It sounds like it was a disaster but they all laughed about it later. She had many stories about getting lost and having to figure out where she was and how to get where she needed to be. I traveled with her quite a bit. Our first trip together was when I was going to be studying for a semester in Edinburgh, Scotland. She and Charlie took me on a 14-day, pre-semester bus trip through England, Scotland, and Wales. At 20, I was by far the youngest person on the trip. Gram and I spent a lot of time alone together on that trip because Charlie got sick and couldn’t do a lot with us. He’d sit miserably on a bench, waiting for the group to return so he could get into bed at the next hotel. The sad thing is that Charlie died the night they returned home.

Like most people, my grandmother had her share of hardship and tragedy. Her son, my uncle Marvin, died in a car crash over Christmas in 1976. Charlie died in 1984. She had breast cancer when she was in her late 50s and underwent a radical mastectomy. The resulting lymphedema plagued her for the rest of her life with regular bouts of cellulitis. She once broke her leg but couldn’t afford not to work and so she never had a cast or took time off to let it heal. She was resilient and focused on the positive things in her life.

Her children and grandchildren were one of the things she focused on. We lived next door to her (or above her after she sold her house to my parents and she moved into the basement apartment) for my whole life so we spent a lot of time with her. Her regular day off was Thursday and so she took my brother and me to the library most weeks. I credit her with my love of reading. She loved to read (when she had time) so I gave her a Kindle when she was in her 80s. She kept a list of the books she read and there are hundreds of titles on that list. She would bring me and my brother and our cousins to the movies on a regular basis. We spent many Saturday nights at her house. I remember lots of vanilla ice cream with Hershey’s chocolate syrup and staying up late to watch The Carol Burnett Show. She loved fruit and dark chocolate and M&Ms and ice cream and cream puffs and so many other sweet things. When we were cleaning out her apartment after she went into the nursing home, we found her stashes of chocolate hidden all over the place.

I know the most about this grandmother because she lived to be 100 years old. I was in my 20s when my other grandparents died so I hadn’t yet figured out that grandparents are people with experiences and hopes and flaws. I was 55 when Gram died and I had time to ask her about herself, to get to know her as an actual person and not just a grandparent. I feel lucky to have been able to learn so much about and share so much with such an incredible woman.