seshat's blog post - Memories

To answer a question: I didn't know my grandfather particularly well. He died when I was 19, but his mind had been muddled by dementia quite a few years before that.

I remember dancing on his toes at a wedding party when I was very little.
I remember him obsessively reciting the Greek alphabet as well as singing a popular song about his home town (het Ros Beiaard van Dendermonde).
I remember playing cards with him:
- manille with four people (usually, from the age of 12, while sipping home-made cherry liqueur my grandmother made)
- crapette (russian bank) with the two of us
- bataille (war) between the two of us, which we did until far into his dementia, because the rules are so simple
I remember playing an invented card game with him in the later stages of his dementia, which was a mix of Rummikub (a game my grandmother loved) combined with the three card games mentioned above. I couldn't understand the rules he was making up as he went along, but I still won

I plan to transcribe his little notebook account of his military campaign. Nothing spectacular so far, but some interesting details. And most of all, it's interesting because it's real and it's family history, a story he never talked about.

As I'm going down memory lane, I thought I might as well post a picture of the alabaster bird I now own and which I remember seeing in my grandparents house (mentioned in a previous blog).