I have been trying for weeks to write a poem about my maternal grandfather. The first few lines are easy — I’ve written maybe a dozen beginnings — but as I write about trying to decipher him, about searching for a connection that never came, I find I am as unable to express myself as I was unable to understand him.
He died in June, 2002. I didn’t see him much in the last few years of his life as I was living in California, and even when I was home, visiting him fell low on the list of things I wanted to do. On the rare occasions I did accompany my mother to the VA Hospital to see him, it was clear he no longer resided behind those vacant eyes, no matter how hard we tried to find him there. He had deteriorated slowly over the last decade of his life, fading with Alzheimer’s from the strange fierce man everyone said had mellowed with age into a frail occupant of a wheelchair.
My childhood memories of him are unlike my memories of any other relative. I was terrified of him, partly because I could never quite understand what he was saying; partly because of the smell of his kitchen, a pungent odor that followed him through his many successive apartments; and partly because no matter what we were doing, it was going to be so hard I was going to cry. He’d say, “I’m going to push you so hard on the swings you’re going to cry,” or, “I’m going to beat you so hard at poker you’re going to cry,” or, “I’m going to throw the ball so hard you’re going to cry.” But on the other hand, I never did cry, and he did take me to the park, teach me to play cards of all kinds, and play catch with me. He also introduced me to baseball, and invited me over one night to watch the All Star game.
I arrived at his apartment shortly before the game was to begin, but due to a rain delay, it didn’t start until several hours later, long past my usual bedtime. The wait was excruciatingly uncomfortable for me. At nine years old, I had little to talk about with him, and he had very little in his tiny apartment to entertain a child. Two things stand out about that night for me — the first was that Jose Canseco was named MVP for scoring the only run of the game, one of the only bits of baseball trivia I will remember forever; the second was a small plaque leaned against a wall in his living room that said, “Small breasted women have big hearts.” The sign confused me. I couldn’t understand what relation existed between the size of breasts and the size of a heart and, moreover, I couldn’t understand what relevance breasts had to my twice-divorced and now single grandfather’s life.
As I got older, things became clearer. When he was no longer able to live on his own and staying in the apartment in our basement, he was still driving to Taco Bell every day to pick up women. The strangest part of this to me was that this strategy actually worked. When he moved into a nursing home, we received reports that he had many girlfriends who would occasionally fight over him. Despite the evidence I saw first hand, I cannot imagine what he must have been like as a younger man in the years after he divorced my grandmother.
Even less real to me were the stories I heard about him working in cryptography during World War II, decoding messages in the South Pacific, or his career as a professor with a doctorate in education. Though equally distant, the stories of him growing up poor in rural Illinois were easier for me to reconcile with the man I knew. I never thought of him as stingy, but he was frugal certainly, sending me pennies taped to cardboard for my birthday — one coin for every year I was old, more spent on postage than on the gift itself.
We returned that summer to those Illinois farmlands to bury him with his family. His relatives, childhood friends, former lovers, children, and grandchildren congregated in the church he attended as a boy to tell stories of a vibrant man overflowing with kindness and generosity. They talked about the joy and love he’d brought into their lives, about how he’d cherished and guided their children, about his dreams, both those he saw fulfilled and those that never came true. They painted a sparkling portrait of a man I never knew.
I am looking for him now. I am digging through old memories; searching for clues in fragments of the riddles that comprised his speech; seeing over and over the image of him sitting in his wheelchair, just months before he died, my sister next to him, a glimmer of recognition flashing across his face as he looked at her. I am looking for his strength in the hand he tried to raise to touch her brilliant golden hair before it fell back to the tray across his lap. I am seventeen, driving the car that was given to me when he could no longer use it, meandering as he did through Pennsylvania hills. I am wondering what else I have inherited.