Other than the occasion when my sister's old boyfriend visited with my sister, I can recall only two other visits from people who lived out-of-town, when living with my parents in "Naptown" during the summer of 1963. On one weekend, my mother's younger sister, her husband and her two boys, who were both a few years younger than me, drove down from where they lived near Chicago, in Skokie, to spend the afternoon and early evening with my parents and me.
But I can't recall now much how we spent the day, other than vaguely thinking that we must have driven around Indianapolis's Monument Circle area downtown and then eaten an early evening dinner at our rented house, that my mother cooked for us, before they started their drive back up home to the Chicago area.
On Saturday on another weekend, which was an extremely hot and humid one, in August of 1963, my mother's parents came down from their Chicago slum apartment on a Greyhound bus to visit my parents, my sister and me for the first time in Indianapolis. The original weekend plan was for my grandparents to spend the night in our Indianapolis home, before then getting on the bus on Sunday afternoon, the following day, to return to Chicago.
But after my parents, my sister and I met them at the early 1960's Greyhound bus terminal in Downtown Indianapolis, drove my grandparents back to where we lived near 52nd Street and College Avenue on the northeast side of the city, arrived at our rented house, walked into our living room and immediately turned on the living room air-conditioning unit, my grandmother, who was then apparently in her late 60's, quickly decided she wanted to go back to her slum apartment in Chicago, immediately.
My grandfather, who was more good-natured and assimilated into the U.S. labor force as a loader of morning newspapers onto Chicago Tribune newspaper delivery trucks on the night shift at the Tribune's printing press facility in Downtown Chicago, would have wanted to stay for the night (especially after the air-conditioning unit that was turned on cooled the living room so much that he exclaimed "M'chaya.'"), because he was eager to spend some time with his daughter and her children.
But neither my mother nor my grandfather were successful in persuading my grandmother--who by that time in her life seemed to have a personality that was totally opposite of my mother and her younger sister's jovial, good-natured, easy-going personalities ( and apparently by then my grandmother could only feel comfortable when she was staying inside the four walls of her own slum apartment)--to stay over for the night, especially after having already been on the bus for four hours that day on the trip down from Chicago.
But my grandmother--who, as an immigrant daughter of an orthodox Lithuanian rabbi who did not emigrate, had arrived in the USA as a teenager shortly after the Titanic (which had originally been the ship she was going to sail on) sank--stubbornly insisted that she wanted to go back to Chicago immediately. So, despite my grandfather being disappointed that their visit to his daughter's home in Indianapolis was to be such a short one, we all quickly got them in the car again with us, drove back downtown to the Indianapolis Greyhound bus station and put them on a late afternoon bus that was heading to Chicago.
In retrospect, my grandmother, by that time in her life, probably no longer wanted to travel anywhere or go out of her apartment anytime, except to maybe shop in her own neighborhood. And it was likely that the only reason she had agreed to take the bus down to visit my mother's home at that time was because my grandfather, then in his early 70's, was still adventurist enough and Americanized enough to be eager to visit his daughter in Indianapolis, despite the weather being hot and humid in August.
Or possibly, when my grandmother again saw how much materially nicer her daughter's living situation and neighborhood in Indianapolis was than was her own living situation, she may have felt envious of her daughter; and so remaining in her daughter's home for more than a few minutes perhaps reminded her of how economically poverty-stricken, in comparison, most of her whole 20th-century life in Chicago had generally been.
