1.07 Grandmother Interview Questions

Interview Part 1 My Nana and Papa (my Mom’s parents) were gracious enough to let me interview them. They have been married for 62 years. To start off, I asked them how they met, Papa said that is was love at first sight in high school. Nana told me this wasn’t true, that they had actually met in 8th grade. They grew up in a very small town, and graduated with a class of around thirty kids. It was pretty hard to not know people in the town they grew up in. When I asked what stood out to them about each other, my Papa’s response came as a shock to me when he said that Nana had “nice breasts and a nice figure”. Nana was beginning to be embarrassed by the interview at this point. She said that what she remembered from the beginning of the relationship

When they first got married they lived on a farm so they had to tend to the fields, milk cows, and take care of all the animals on the farm. Papa jokingly said that he decided to marry Nana because they thought she was pregnant, again embarrassing Nana. The real story was that Papa asked Nana to marry him when he was building a house, he needed help with it, so he gave her a ring and asked for the help that he needed on the house. When I asked them out of all the people in the world why they chose each other, they both burst into uncontrollable laughter. Papa’s response was yet again quite inappropriate, he said the reason why was that she “was probably the right color” and that she “would make fine babies”. Nana said that he was a great basketball player and an overall really good

I had to jump in a couple times to get my Nana and Papa back on track with the interview. I was quite nervous about interviewing my grandparents for this assignment because of some of the questions I had to ask. Asking about a struggle that they went through was hard to ask because it’s kind of an invasive question that I didn’t know how they would respond to. My thoughts on committed relationships haven’t changed much after this interview process. I have almost always known that marriage is hard work but if both of the people are putting in equal amounts of effort into the relationship it’ll almost always work out (of course there are always exceptions). I was quite surprised by some of my grandparents responses to the questions I asked. My Papa definitely had fun joking around about different things about their relationship (even though the joking responses were almost always just that, a joke). I have never heard Papa joke like he did in this interview ever before in my life, so it was enlightening, seeing a whole other side of him that I never have before. When Nana and Papa started to talk about their loss of a child, it was absolutely heartbreaking. Even decades later, Nana could barely talk about it. Papa did most of the talking through out the interview, which wasn’t shocking. Papa loves to talk anyones ear