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Tuesday, December 02, 2003

seventeen years ago today

I was always afraid of both of my grandfathers. I felt like I embarrassed them, like they didn't know me and what they did know about me, they didn't like. This began to change a bit, with my maternal grandfather, when I was eleven and started winning spelling bees. All of a sudden Grandpa was bragging about me to people -- something I was not accustomed to. My trophies grew a foot apiece every tim he told anyone about them. Up till this point Grandpa had always been terribly intimidating to me, and a small bit embarrassing. We moved into his house, my brother, parents, and myself, when I was 10 and he was 75. He had had a variety of careers -- he'd gone to college late in life, studied agriculture specializing in bird diseases (I later found out that he and Beverly Cleary's husband were in the same department at the same college at the same time; I wonder if they knew each other?). Then he kept William Randolph Hearst's aviaries until the beginning of WWII, when he enlisted in the Navy. He was a mechanic; he got the end of his finger cut off showing one of his superiors that a motor was functioning properly. (item: the only other Really Old Person I knew was my great-great aunt Hazel, Grandpa's aunt; she was also missing a finger, which caused me, in my early childhood, to believe that when you got old you just started getting fingers cut off as a matter of course, like getting glasses and gray hair). After the war he married my grandmother, seventeen years his junior, and they proceeded to bear and bring up seven children -- one boy and six girls -- on a narrow shoestring. They must have done a remarkably good job because there is not one "bad egg" in the bunch. Grandpa built his house and his barn by hand (although his methods were -- interesting, to say the least. Growing up I thought everybody's grandpas had cattle gates made from Model T frames); he ran a chicken ranch; he taught junior high. I bear a strong resemblance to both sides of my family; the people who knew my mother and aunts in school tend to ask me if I am one of them, and when I explain that no, they're my mom/aunts, invariably the next thing the other person says is, "Oh, yes, I had your grandfather as a teacher in junior high. What a man." As a matter of fact, Grandpa's first meetings with my dad took place in the classroom and were not auspicious. Dad was neither an excellent student or a model pupil where behavior was concerned (he was the guy smuggling kittens into the class and passing them around behind the teacher's back.). He should have had the foresight to know that he was going to fall in love with one of the teacher's fair daughters, because when Mom announced at eighteen that she and Dad were an item, soon to share a last name, Grandpa took quite a while to get used to the idea. But he eventually came around and had quite a bit of respect for Dad, in spite of the rocky start to their relationship.


When I lived with Grandpa, I got to know him as a mandolin-playing crotchety-seeming old man. He was on a restricted diet due to his heart problems and it was impossible for anyone serving him food to win where that was concerned. If we offered him ice cream or milk we were trying to kill him. If we didn't we were excluding him. Heaven help the person who spoke too loudly while Ronald Reagan was speaking on television; Grandpa had been a huge fan of Reagan all the way from Hollywood on.
He used to walk around the house strumming the mandolin and belting out old songs like "Has Anybody Seen My Gal" and "This Old House". At the time -- I was, you remember, in that sensitive and easily-embarrassed preteen stage -- I found this mildly humiliating, but to this day, those tunes bring back my grandfather so strongly to me that I can smell his goat's-milk-and-wool-flannel kind of smell.


Grandpa wrote his memoirs something like three or four times. This fact bears a bit of a breath of self-importance in it, doesn't it. But now I'm glad he did. It's very interesting to read about the life of someone who lived through all the things he lived through -- and to laugh a little at the grandiose way he describes everything, especially his experiences with women. (more than one of his daughters bore as one part of their names, the name of one of his former flames. Wonder how Grandma felt about that...). He was born in 1910 in blazing San Joaquin Valley heat, well before the advent of air conditioning, weighing 12 pounds, at the end of a two-day labor. His poor mother. It's a wonder she got near her husband ever again. He rode streetcars around Fresno for a nickel, and survived the flu epidemic, two world wars, the Great Depression, and severe heart disease, all by the age of 40.

This is the seventeenth anniversary of the day my grandfather died. His was the first death of anyone I was even remotely close to -- my first grief, my first funeral. We were on the way home from a Thanksgiving dinner when he became terribly ill in a city far from his home in the hills. He died in their hospital a few days later. At the time I felt very Important And Sad because Someone Close To Me Had Died. I didn't understand him very well when he was alive. I had no idea how much more I would grieve for him years later, wishing I'd had the chance to know him as an adult.

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