In Memory of Mr. & Mrs. Lowry ( Pup Pup & Mum Mum)
Warren & Gracie's Maternal Great-Grandparents

My son, Warren, has been living with my parents in Kentucky this semester because he decided he wanted to go back to his old school, which he'd been attending for the past year and half before I moved to California.  In Kentucky, we lived right next door to my parents on a shared piece of property in a little rural town called Centertown, Kentucky.  Centertown's entire population of 400 or so folks is about 1/4 the population of our apartment complex in Aliso Viejo, California!  Warren enjoys a terrific relationship with my parents, whom he calls "Nanny" & "Paw Paw", so we all decided that if this was what Warren wanted that we'd give the arrangement a trial.  After all, lots of boys Warren's age go off to boarding school and the like.

I'm happy to report that it appears Nanny & Paw Paw's Boarding School is a pretty solid place for 14 year old boys to make the transition from adolescent to young man.  Warren continues to be extremely happy and to develop into about as fine a young man as I've known in the environment of his choosing.  We haven't decided about next fall yet and right now we're just looking forward to the wedding and then a great summer with Warren hopefully spending most the summer with Nicole and I in Orange County.

Warren has earned the right to be self-directed so long as his decisions are workable and the results are positive.  So far, knock on his father's wooden head, so good!

He's such a simple, loving and responsible kid and he prefers his life to be predictable, stable and of a matching simple elegance.  His time with Nanny & Paw Paw in the country provides Warren with an idyllic daily existence for his tastes.  In fact, I've taken to calling him "Country" after his maternal great-grandfather who went by "Country&quo t; most all his life and was the only name I knew him by before his death early into my marriage to Warren's mother.

We'll call them Big Country and Lil' Country to keep them straight!

Big Country was old-school tough and plenty awnry.  He played football at Alabama for a year back when there were no pads and the helmets were just a thin layer of leather to keep your brains from falling out when you rammed your head into other players.  Later, he worked in steel mills and was said to have been strong as an ox and just as bull-headed when it came to doing things Big Country's way.  He married a gorgeous woman who was still as beautiful and fiesty when I met her and she was nearly 80 years of age at the time!  Their beautiful daughter Madelyn is the maternal grandmother that Warren and Grace, unfortunately, were never able to meet.  Madelyn was once an aspiring model and actress herself before she got into the birthing babies business and later to moved to Louisville, Kentucky when her husband got a great new job as a Corporate Attorney at General Electric's Appliance Park.  GE at one time employed over 12,000 folks in Louisville's Appliance Park, but, now employs only a couple of thousand there on a sprawling campus that is eerily empty and inactive compared to its hay-day.

Warren clearly has a strong genetic connection to Mr. Lowry, including his big head!  Big Country's big head was legendary.  One of the funniest stories I heard him tell was that when he was a young man and wearing a hat was very much in vogue, his friends would entertain themselves in the city by taking Country into hat stores to watch the flustered attendant attempt to fit Country for a hat.  Hat stores apparently didn't stock hats big enough for Big Country's substantial cranium.  Country would say "Why don't I try this one" or "that one" and then would model the ill fitting lid for his friends while asking, "How does this one look?"

Each hat, of course, would look completely ridiculou s sitting atop his noggin like a thimble on a baseball! 

I can't remember exactly, but, it seems to me that this may be how Big Country met his wife.  I'll have to get the details straight, however, before going any further in that direction with this story.

It is really too bad that Big Country never got to meet Lil' Country because they'd have certainly taken to each other very quickly.  One things for sure, you don't want to take either one of 'em hat shopping unless you're just in it for a laugh!