family ties
with my knees unable to reach the edge of the seat, i perched like a puppet with feet outstretched on the beige interior of my grandfather’s Jaguar. The front seat was spacious as was his laugh as he bellowed our destination. You see, my grandfather had a strange obsession: he would take my brothers and I to Hooters to get himself a beer and us a milk or soda and then would slip ten or fifteen matchbooks into his linty pockets to transport them back to an oaken office at home where they would sit in a dusty bowl on a shelf next to a gold clock with the earth as seen from above and the time zones and a plane that circumnavigated the face of the globe every sixty seconds.
in yet another seat, i would find myself again with my knees locked and unbent on an oak bench in hooters and my grandfather would drink his beer and watch television. I don’t remember speaking to him. I just remember being there. Besides this, the arcade games in the basement of his house is all I can conjure from the memory.
I bring this up because my brother, after lubing the mental joints with an IPA, reflected one night: “Remember how much of a dick grandpa was?”
It’s quite strange how this memory creeps to the forefront. I never like to speak ill of the dead but i think sometimes, death infiltrates reality and we can’t get rid of the need to remember the good times. As a young boy, I never really had good times. I was six or seven years old at the time of his and my grandmother’s death. (My grandmother and he had five children, the youngest being my father).
I have made a point to learn about the influential people in my life of which i had never been able to fully experience their potential. My mother’s father died of Alzheimer’s disease when i was ten, a loss that didn’t affect me until i was consoled in a summer computer camp at my grade school by my much-hated teacher whom personally knew my grandfather l. I have never heard a word spoken against that grandfather. he raised seven children with my grandmother, my mother being the oldest. he was CEO of a large company in Cincinnati and knew just about everyone in the city. he was truly a great man. so when i get the chance, i speak to my grandmother about him. her words pull strings on my cheeks and my heart as each story sinks within…
when i tried to do this with my other grandfather, i was less impressed.
according to my aunt, my grandmother sidled with a sigh into marriage with my grandfather. she was a part of a loving german family on the west side of town. back then, my aunt explained, you would graduate and then get married. there was no alternative. somehow, she found jack (my grandfather). jack was born in ireland and his father was a drunk and a bastard (my interpretation). apparently, this rubbed off on him (my aunt’s interpretation). he hated his wife’s family because they were german. from the short phrases used to describe him and the long pauses in between them, i assume that he was not winning father of the year any time soon.
my aunt had reason to be salty towards the man. when she finished high school, jack refused to pay for college and told her to find a man and settle down. far from settlement and in the prime of her teenage rebellion, she moved away and traveled the country, distancing herself from him and his expectations.
jack died of a heart attack in his sleep one night during the summer when i was six years old. the family grieved. i don’t remember it. within a month, my grandmother passed in the exact same manner: in her sleep, heart attack.
when any romantic hears this, they are prone to awe over its romeo and juliet-ness. she “couldn’t live without him.” but those with the full story, the story that ends with “your are so lucky to have your father. he did his best to not be like grandpa jack,” it’s less romantic and more tragic for my grandmother, a sweet lady who seemed to have her hands full. It is less like Carl and Ellie and more like Thelma and Louise.
i entertain the topic because i am curious at what lengths family will go to in order to like one another. if i were an adult at the time, would i have seen past the bad to highlight the select passages in a ulysses-length memoir of tyranny? for the longest time, i sat in that big oaken chair in a hooters and read the scores scrolling across the screen and the foam disappear from grandpa’s glass and onto his clean-shaven upper lip. and sometimes i still sit there, admiring the man for his sheer “big-ness.” but he was a man, as distraught and bummed out by life as the rest of us. i wonder what became of those matches and where they are now and who, if ever, might have struck them. because these are the things that family can leave behind: a quarter, a nickle, three pennies, a receipt, and a more matches than a bowl can hold.
