Grandpa
Last night I dreamed of my Grandpa. He died 7 years ago when Link was a baby. Kiki is the only one of my kids who has any memory of him. She calls him “Grandpa lying down” because She was there the day they brought him home from the hospital on a back board. He was unable to walk from the ambulance to his bed in the house. By the time he died, he’d been bedridden for 5 years and the Grandpa I’d loved was long gone. Howard never got to meet the vibrant, interesting person he was. Howard only met a sick old man too tired to do much talking. I wish my kids had someone like my Grandpa. Grandpa was a tinkerer. He had a huge garage that he’d built himself. It was full of air compressors and table mount vice grips and soddering irons and radio tubes. It was so full of those things that there was only a narrow walkway through them to the workbench. I still remember the smell of that place. It was a strange mix of concrete, grease, and metal. I was only allowed in occasionally and only if Grandpa was with me because there were too many dangerous tools and machines lying around in there.
Grandpa fixed everything. He always had a project and he always involved his grandkids when we were around. With Grandpa I straightened bicycle spokes, sawed through lumber by hand, formed table legs on a lathe, soddered circuit boards, and any number of other things. Obviously Grandpa had no antiquated ideas about “girls work” and “boys work” we all did stuff with Grandpa. He called me his “Gal” with his southern accent mellowed by years of living in California. He’d sit me on his lap and tickle me with his “billy-goat beard” and tell me tall tales about hunting for bears. Grandma would scold him for telling such tall tales, but we all loved them. I wish I could remember the tales, but I can’t. All I can remember is that I loved them and listened to them with a wide-eyed wonder, not sure if I should believe them or not. Grandpa’s hands were never clean, no matter how often he washed them. The grease and dirt was ground in so thoroughly it wouldn’t come off. Those hands were hard and calloused. The hands of a man who tinkered and worked all day every day.
Grandpa was always skinny. The fact that he was missing about half of his teeth might have had something to do with it. Grandma always had to adjust her southern cooking so that there were foods Grandpa could eat. As an adult I wonder why he never got dentures or implants, but he never did. He just grinned his grin full of holes. Grandpa was also deaf in one ear. I think he was hard of hearing in the other one as well. We always had to speak loud and clear so that Grandpa could hear us. He had a succession of hearing aids, including some that he made himself. He didn’t like them much though. He was always taking them out and losing them. It was only years later that we figured out that perhaps some of the “losing” was on purpose so he could pretend not to hear Grandma when the mood struck him. He seemed to like the hearing aids he made for himself better even though they were invariably bulky. He even rigged a hand held speaker to the TV so that he could hold it up to his ear. That way everyone could have comfortable volume levels.
One summer he had all of us kids help him haul rocks to clear the ground for a huge garden. He planted and created sprinkling systems so that the plants would live. We’d come for visits and help with the harvesting. The garden seemed to get bigger every year. Especially the strawberry patch. We loved the strawberry patch. The grasshoppers also loved the strawberry patch. One of our favorite pasttimes was catching jars full of grasshoppers. They came in a startling array of varieties. Grandpa didn’t like the grasshoppers. He was happy that we caught them. Less happy when we released them back into the wild on the other end of the yard. It seemed so far away to us, but I’m sure they were back in the strawberries in less than an hour. An acre just isn’t that far to a grasshopper. Grandpa also arranged sprinklers for Grandma’s flowers and the small patch of lawn. Grandpa tinkered and planted in the garden for years. It seemed like he was always shifting rocks and making it bigger. Then the garden stopped getting bigger. Then the garden began shrinking. The shrinking of the garden was the first sign that Grandpa was beginning to wear out, although we didn’t know it at the time.
In my dream he was the Grandpa of my childhood. He was all the things I’ve told and more that I’m unable to describe. I woke missing him so much that I wanted to cry.