The human brain is such that basic facts from our youth are likely to remain lodged there decades later when we struggle to recall the name of the new co-worker sitting across from you.

I remember the birthdays of neighborhood pals. I know the date of D-Day, Waterloo, V-E Day and the Little Bighorn. I can recite the winners of every World Series of the 1960s.

I also remember the day my grandmother died.

August 1, 1966

Since 1966, no August 1 has passed without me thinking of her.

I like to think we were close. I spent a lot of time at her home, in Belmont Shore, down by the ocean, where she lived alone in her final years. She formerly had a dog, Pretzel, but she had no pets, those final years.

Maybe that is why my parents encouraged me to spend a weekend night with her, and I happily slept over on many Fridays — in theory entertaining her when she really was entertaining me.

I remember that nothing was out of bounds when I was with her. Not that I behaved badly. But in terms of what we did or what we saw on TV, or how much ice cream I could have … all that was my choice.

She loved to play cards, which is perhaps why she usually sat on a folding chair at a card table, with the TV over her shoulder. (Never on the green couch in her small living room. Never on the one upholstered chair.) She taught me how to play rummy, which she regularly beat me at unless she was letting me win, and she was so patient that she allowed me to play “war” — the dullest of all possible card games.

(I suppose she wanted me to figure it out myself; and I did. We stopped playing war.)

The TV usually was on in the background. I remember watching a lot of professional wrestling, live from the Olympic Auditorium, which was big in Los Angeles in the 1960s. She was a Freddie Blassie fan. We also saw a lot of roller derby — the Los Angeles Thunderbirds, led by Ralphie Valladares, were regular fare, as well. I don’t know if she enjoyed that stuff or whether she thought I would.

We sometimes watched more illuminating TV; I distinctly remember seeing a special report entitled, “D-Day Plus 20 Years.” Walter Cronkite was the narrator and I immediately loved the intro music which years later I discovered was the orchestral treatment of Simple Gifts from Copeland’s Appalachian Spring.

When she saw something surprising, or strange, she would say: “Heck-a-doo-doo!” Really. I’ve never heard anyone else use that word; maybe she invented it. It was meant to connote a sense of wonder or enthusiasm.  She never used bad language. She rarely raised her voice, other than to say “heck-a-doo-doo!”

She would make me dinner, as we bunkered in for the night, and we always (always) had ice cream for dessert, and I did nearly all the eating. If it were vanilla ice cream, she would heat up a chocolate sauce from powdered chocolate and water, and I remember the nearly boiling confection melting the ice cream in my bowl. Sometimes, the ice cream would be vanilla, in a glass, doused with with root beer or orange soda. I’m fairly sure I’ve never had an orange soda float since she died, which is a bit odd, because I really liked them.

We talked about history some. Not as much as I wish we had, looking back, but I was 10, 11 years old and I didn’t get around to asking her what it was like to live through the World Wars or the Depression or to be alive when Teddy Roosevelt was president. (She was born in 1890.) When I was a bit older, I would have asked her about most of that. I would have asked what kind of kid my father had been.

Both of my grandmothers were alive, then, but I called one “Grandmother” or “Grandmother Laura” (almost never “Grandma”) and the other “Nanny”.

I remember Grandmother Laura having strong opinions about a few grown-up things. She was a confirmed Republican. I don’t know if she had always been — most ethnic Germans from the St. Louis area, which is where she was born and lived until coming to California in 1940, were Democrats because Republicans were associated with Prohibition and the Germans liked their beer. Or so a history professor would tell me 10 years later.

She said that Democrats got the country into wars, and in her lifetime, it had pretty much been that way (Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy/Johnson), and she thought that was a bad thing.

I later decided that her anti-Democrat stance might have been mostly personal. Her future husband was drafted into the Navy, during World War I, which the U.S. stayed out of until near the end. In 1919, while still in the Navy, he came down with a bad case of the Spanish flu, which probably contributed to his death at age 50 in 1940, which preceded my grandmother’s move that same year, with her three children, to the West Coast. Her elder daughter drove the car in the trip across Route 66; Grandma Laura never learned how to drive.

Her other strong opinion, expressed to me, anyway, was an antipathy towards cats. She said they “killed birds” and that was enough to convince her of the correctness of her stance. I am pretty sure she kept a parakeet much of her life. She liked dogs.

She was a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals. She spoke often of the “Redbirds” and Dizzy Dean and the Gashouse Gang. (I had no idea what a gashouse was, and oddly, I didn’t ask her.)

She always wore a house dress. She often wore a shawl, to ward off the cold on winter evenings. She wore black shoes. She was in her 70s when I was spending time there, and she didn’t walk well. I believe she had arthritis in her hands. Her hair was white.

She said, yes, it snowed in St. Louis, which she didn’t mind (and I found exotic); what she minded was the slush that came after the snow.

She had 11 grandchildren, but I was the only one (as far as I knew) to stay overnight with her regularly. It was a function of location (I lived less than a mile away) and probably age. I was young enough to converse and play cards and watch wrestling with … but not old enough to be willful. An older grandson, my cousin, sometimes rode his bike quite a distance to get there and did chores, like mowing the lawn. I never did chores; I just hung around and chatted with my grandmother, played rummy and ate ice cream.

We were pals, I thought, and I liked being there and I was confident she liked having me there, and I like to think I was right about that.

She never forced me to go to bed, but she must have recommended it, somehow, because I slept in the big bedroom while she slept in the smaller bedroom, at the front of the house. During baseball season, she would go to sleep to the sound of Vin Scully describing Dodgers baseball, and I could hear Vinny, as well, down the short hall.

(Years later I told Vin about putting my grandmother to sleep, in the 1960s, and Vinny said: “I’ve put a lot of people to sleep.”)

In 1966, I didn’t go to her house as often. I didn’t think about it a lot, but she must have felt less up to having a pre-teen hanging around. I remember a period, in summer, when she stayed inside her house most of the time and mostly alone. I remember my mother speaking to her on the phone, and my grandmother saying she recently had been sicker than she had ever been — but was feeling better.

About that time, my mother and I and my four younger siblings, including my infant sister (born in March) went over to visit, and my grandmother had lost a lot of weight. I was shocked and agitated. She had always been jolly and a bit chubby. This time, she was gaunt and tired. I remember sitting on the fringe of the room, and I remember her saying, “Come over; I won’t bite.” And I remember feeling ashamed that she had noticed me hanging back like that. I was afraid.

Her kidneys were failing, a sign of what back then was called “hardening of the arteries.” Late in July she was checked into the hospital by my parents; she didn’t like hospitals. To her generation, hospitals were where people went to die.

My parents woke me, as the eldest child, on the night of August 1, 1966, and told me my grandmother had died. She was 75. They were going to the hospital to do things grownups did when someone died. I was put in charge of my siblings, who all were sleeping. It was late, after 11:30, which I know because Johnny Carson was on television.

My Grandmother Laura was the first person close to me to die. I had known, sorta, a kid who was in second grade at my school, when I was in third grade, who died during heart surgery, and his funeral was held with the whole school in attendance. That event spooked me. There was a dead child in the open casket and the kids were given a choice of seeing him one last time or walking out the other door — and I took the second option.

My grandmother dying just made me very sad. Some of it was my sense that she was a source of unconditional love, gone. Some of it was my disappointment that I had let her down. I didn’t go over to her house for a few months there, then I saw her when she was sick and I was alarmed and remote, and she noticed it, and that was the last time I saw her.

All I can do for her now is remember her as a relentlessly kind and patient and good woman who indulged me when I didn’t deserve it. I was sure she was in heaven, if anyone was, and I still believe that today. Every August 1, I remember her.