some more family history

Here are some more facts I've learned about my grandmother:

More than anything, June wanted to go to college. She wanted to learn, to think big thoughts, to become someone. Her parents hadn't gone to college, but she wanted to, depserately. She finished high school early, graduating before she turned 16. She begged Eli and Rosie to let her enroll in junior college. Each and every time she asked, they refused. They needed her. "What do you need with all that nonsense anyway?"

These were the services Eli and Rosie required of their adolescent daughter:

1) Drive Eli (who himself was a horrible driver and couldn't be trusted behind the wheel of a car) to his stores in Long Beach and San Diego, as well as driving him in around New York in the months he lived and worked there.

2) Provide companionship, distraction and perverse vicarious emotional (dis)satisfaction for her lonely and domineering grandmother, Ruth, who in her widowhood decreed that she would live with Eli and Rosie; none of Ruth's other children were willing to take her in, or on. In the family's Manhattan apartment, Ruth shared June's childhood bedroom.

3) Drive Ruth, Rosie and her uncle Edgar across the United States (during the depths of the Depression, during the dustbowl years) twice a year, like migrating birds who followed the season of money as Eli displaced himself to follow the navy fleets from which he earned his living. Navigate along the way -- because none of the others could either drive or even read a map to help her.

4) Drive "Edgar's errands" -- purchasing heroin from the nearest dealer, in Harlem or Tijuana, and later Ingelwood, depending on the coast of their current residency.