Goines On: Go be gone

Click image for more vignettes

When his Father’s Day card arrived addressed to “Grandpa Go,” both Goines and his wife did a double-take. “‘Go’?” Mrs. Goines exclaimed. “I thought the only people who called you ‘Go’ were your college chums.”
    It was sort of true. Before Goines moved into the freshman dormitory in college (51 years earlier), the only person who had called him “Go” was Goines himself, when he made up that 8th-grade campaign poster with the slogan, “Get mo’ with Go!” – his second draft, after rejecting “Mow with Go!”
    “Get mo’ with Go!” had seemed to work – he won the election to become student body president. But “Go” hadn’t thenceforth become his nickname, although a certain wise-cracking friend in high school might occasionally refer to him that way.

No, it hadn’t been until he moved into Lawrance Hall for his freshman year in college and met his roommate from Pittsburgh. The new roommate’s father, who was there to supervise his son’s moving-in, addressed Goines as “Go” – and then kept on talking non-stop as though it were a done deal. The new roommate seemed to take it as a done deal, for he never thereafter called Goines anything else. And Goines’ second roommate, who arrived the next day, took it up too, and so did almost everyone else in the dormitory setting, that year and the next year, too, when they moved into one of the residential colleges for upperclassmen. And the college friends with whom Goines stayed in touch still called him “Go” wherever and whenever their paths intersected.
    But “Grandpa Go”? Please, no mo’!

Copyright © 2021 by Moristotle