Pop

I've written here a little about my grandparents, mostly my mom's parents, who I knew much better than my dad's. My mom's dad, Pop, was loud and politically incorrect and easily exasperated, but he loved my grandmother more than anything in the world, and in between all of his bad behavior, he was sweet and gentle and affectionate. He loved fishing, even though the priest at his funeral got that mixed up and talked about how he loved model cars, or something, which made us all giggle uncontrollable, and helped to lighten the mood considerably.

Anyway, in addition to lying straight to our faces with stories like Gus, Sam and Gregory Peck being the Three Wise Men, Pop enjoyed assigning crazy nicknames to all of my siblings and me. I can't even remember all of them; one of my sisters, I think, was 72 Mack; another was Nutzie Fagan. I was The Baby, up until Pop died when I was 19 years old, but I also was Osceola Guy Lacy.

I had no idea who Osceola Guy Lacy was until today (and, in fact, I always thought of it as Gailaesi, or something), although I had a vague recollection that he was a baseball player. But I discovered today that he was a baseball player who, as one web site put it, "had coffee with" the Indians: he only played for 3 months, in 1926. He had 24 at-bats his entire career in the majors.

So I wish I'd known all that, or at least paid attention, because I am struggling to understand what Pop meant by assigning me that nickname. Maybe nothing at all; it might have been as arbitrary as Gus, Sam and Gregory Peck. Maybe he loved that Osceola got a taste of the big-time and then settled back into a relatively calm, obscure life away from the spotlight and the pressure of MLB. Maybe he thought I was too big for my britches, and needed to be taken down a peg. Maybe he rooted for him the summer he was 24, which may have been the year he married my grandmother.

What I do know is that I'm glad that there was a horse racing this weekend at Saratoga named Osceola Prince, because that's what made me think about all of this and inspired me to do some research. But I also know that I need to quit it with the betting on a horse just because of his name, because as much as I want it to be, that is NOT a valid indicator that he's going to win.