If by some miracle I fathered a child
then that child would never know his great-grandparents. He wouldn't
know Abraham Lincoln either so that might not come as a big surprise.
But my point is that he would not know people who were instrumental
in his own existence and formative to my own.
I drove both of my grandfather's cars.
They preferred larger 8 cylinder cruisers with power windows and
blue or brown interiors. Neither of them owned as much as a socket
set. Their cars smelled like baby powder and aftershave. Their words
as we cruised down the street were casual references to my beard, job
prospects and girlfriends.
My mother's father, Sam, rubbed his
knee replacement while he drove with a hand covered by white hair on
the knuckles, his blue polyester slacks binding at the thigh. He wore
patent leather loafers and white socks and button up short sleeve
shirts with a white tank top underneath. He wore silver dollar bolo ties and didn't think that was unusual. He had a way of working the
steering wheel like it was a ship's anchor line that needed turning.
That was a sturdy steering wheel, by the way, strong, indestructible.
It's probably still out there somewhere!
"Well, Oggy, you won't get rich
doin' nothin'. Clothes a mess...face all a hairy. Boy-o-boy!"
His tone, a toothy New England farm
folk slang, said it all, that I was hardly worth lecturing with my
girl hair length and fake frame glasses and flowery tank top shirt
with nothing to cover it.
"Good looking boy like you hiding
behind all that hair? Look, there's a barber. How about it? I'll
pay!"
Never mind that this grandfather had
lost his hair by the time he was thirty so the option of growing a
mane like mine was never one to choose. I would nod because when he
framed the topic thusly I really had no rebuttal. He had enjoyed
taking photographs and one picture he took of our house in Maine will
forever represent an idea and image I have of my early childhood. I
could have argued that like his interest in photography had born
fruit, I too had amateur designs on a life as a writer and my first
assignment to myself was to read. But raising the lofty example of
Hermann Hesse or Jack Kerouac would have been futile so I was content
to listen to the talk radio station and watch the college students
merrily march their books to class. Our big blue Oldsmobile thundered
down the street under my grandfather's sure hand. I'd say he was 83
at the time and we were on our way to visit his wife in the long-term
care facility. He made me banana pancakes for lunch with maple syrup
and butter and considered it the height of acceptable gluttony. His
wife liked playing scrabble and getting postcards from her daughters.
She didn't drive at all from what I could remember.
The last time I drove with my father's
father, Bob, the source of my middle name, it was down a tree lined
corridor in the college town of his adult life. I was certain we
would crash because he was genuinely oblivious to other drivers,
pedestrians, obstacles, stop signs, lights, cats, everything. He
squinted through his glasses and muttered with grumpy dissuasion.
He'd had a stroke some years earlier and a man of few words became a
man of no words. He was probably 92 years old and we were
going to fill a prescription at the drug store.
"Stop sign!" I blurted as we
glided through a four way stop.
He muttered while I gripped the door
handle.
His wife had been the talker of the
family...her elocution and mannerisms borrowed from Katherine
Hepburn. Bob was the keeper of the cigarettes, the guy bringing in
more wood to the fireplace.
"School?" He asked
tentatively as he had long abandoned my fate to the Gods.
My college career had been
disillusioning so I'd decided to take some time for independent
study. I summed this up by saying, "One day. But lately
I'm reading.
I emphasized this last word like he was
hard of hearing, but he wasn't. His lack of voice command made me
think he couldn't understand words either.
"Bullshit!" he said and
muttered something to the effect that this was blowing smoke up his
ass and that I was malingering. I tossed my hands up futilely,
surrendering. I had to save my strength up for real arguments with my
father about the nature of violence and the effect hunger strikes
have on world affairs.
My two sets of grandparents lived in
the same small town for most of their lives, a detail that isn't
common and is becoming less common as biology and chemistry become
less reliant on sociology.
If my son were born I would tell him
his grandparents live in Australia and Holland and I'd need a map of
the entire planet to show him where those places are. My
grandparents, on the other hand, lived in the same zip code and
probably shopped at the same grocery store and had their paper
delivered by the same paper boy. I could find both their houses on a
single town map. More importantly, I'm thinking of the lack of
emotional connection my child would have with his predeceased
great-grandparents. Most of us don't know who our great-grandparents
are so we can all relate. We come into the world and can only hear
the echoes of their voices in the behavior patterns of our
grandparents, whom we hardly give a second thought to until they die
or are stricken or send us large Christmas checks, and in the barely
contained battle our parents wage for control. It's already laid out,
our genetic infrastructure, and the architects are dead. We drive
through town oblivious to the stop signs and intersections they
previously paved, plowing through the fields they planted and parking
on their flower beds.
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