susannahjoy

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0275255/
that's my great grandfather (my mother's mother's father). he died when i was in 1st grade. i dont remember much about him, but the memories that i do have are surprsingly strong. we used to go to his house in thousand oaks and sit out in his screened in back porch overlooking the pool (heated to 88 degrees, almost as hot as the air) with all the orange trees and draw in the coloring books he gave us. those books were the coolest things that i had ever seen cuz they had tracing paper in them. after we finished a picture we'd give it to him and he'd put them up on his fridge. i still associate the smell of orange blossoms to him. when my mom told me that "bop" died i remember that she looked kinda uncomfortable when i asked her how. at the time i just sorta ignored that, cuz when you're a kid adults do all kinds of weird things like that. it wasn't until i was a sophmore that i learned that he had killed himself. apparently he saved all his various medications that he was supposed to be taking for a month or so, then took them all one night with a bottle of vodka and went to sleep. thinking about it now it seems a fitting way for an old hollywood writer to die. once my mom and i were looking in some used book store somewhere in california (i dont remember where, somewhere up north i think) and we found one of his books that he had signed. the owner of the store let us have it for free.

anyway, so yeah. now you all know a little bit about one of the members of my family! woohoo!