Green Thumb and grandson
I was hanging out slapping MOE-skee-TOES in the Landfill back yard after work this afternoon thinking something like, “dum de dum de dum, whatami gonna blahg about today?”
So Bob next door was making noise in his back yard. Not annoying noise, sounded like he was trying to muster a prodject. After a bit he air-knock-knocked at us in our back yard and asked the GG if he was up to helping hoist a patio table up over his fence. He had recruited a couple other neighborhood guys and one of them was extra friendly.
After a few fleeting comments from us and him about the yooperland and where the FinFam beach is he said (I think) that he had grown up in Sault Ste. Marie. And then he told me who his grandparents were. Ozzie and June. My jaw dropped just about to the floor.
I GREW UP LITERALLY NEXT DOOR TO OZZIE AND JUNE! Ozzie owned a garden/feed shop downtown and drove a truck with Green Thumb MacInnes painted on the side. Every year he grew a patch of corn in his back yard. The Commander always tried to do that too but it never came to much of anything and she would kvetch about how meager her corn patch was compared to Ozzie’s.
It turns out Ozzie and June’s grandson lives around the corner from us, in a house once owned by one of my best Haisley School PTO friends but that’s a story for some other day.
His aunt Bobby (Barbara) has been in my thoughts lately. She was something like six years older than me and I so looked up to her. We liked when she baby-sat us but she wasn’t our most frequent baby-sitter. I’m not sure she liked baby-sitting all that much and I am gonna guess me and my brother were known as brats. But she is still alive and doing well and I am happy about that.
Small world, eh?
October 14th, 2025 at 12:05 am
It is such a small world! One of our first babysitters was my dad’s principal’s (and friend’s) daughter–who then became a nun. I eventually had the principal’s grandson and granddaughter in class, the niece and nephew of the nun.