Monday, October 10, 2011

19 Years and Counting

Yesterday marked 19 years since I last saw my grandfather. It’s been 19 years since I last heard him laugh. 19 years since I’ve smelled his cologne. 19 years since I last hugged him. To think… 19 years ago I only would have come up to his belly during that hug. I could probably rest my head on his shoulder now; I wonder what that would have been like.

When I was five years old my mother moved my sister and me up to Kentucky to live with our grandparents. Mom had gotten a scholarship to go back to school, and her job(s) as a receptionist could only do so much for a family of three in a small Florida town.

I at first was upset about the move. I didn’t want to leave my best friend or my family that all lived within a block of our house. I knew it snowed in Kentucky. I knew we were moving to an even smaller town. I knew my sister was bawling and throwing a fit that her life was over; if she hated it this much then I did too. We had to give up our cat, MY cat. We had to sell my Fischer Price kitchen. We had to drive for 13 hours! I was five. For a five year old a 13 hour drive is like listening to Ann Margret sing the opening to Bye Bye Birdie 80 times in a row through headphones turned up full volume, in other words unbearable. My melancholy over moving lasted about 0.2 seconds though, as most states of melancholy for small children do.

My grandparents lived on a farm at the edge of town towards the top of a mountain. To the back was the barn and sprawling fields. Across the street from the front was a wooded hillside I could explore as I wished since no one lived there.

My grandfather immediately became my best buddy. We’d search for arrow heads in the fields he had just turned and plant vegetables in the little garden he started just for me at the side of the house. We’d eat onions and shuck peas while sitting on the front porch. We’d hunt daddy long legs on the wrap-around porch. When winter came we made snowmen. When spring came we caught locust and collected their husks. We caught a caterpillar in a tin can once and watched it bloom into a moth. We snuck off for ice cream sundaes and foot-long hot dogs at the drive-in. In the mornings before school we’d watch Gilligan’s Island together and eat Egg-Beaters since he had high cholesterol and wasn’t allowed what he deemed “real food.” I ate what he ate. I went where he went. I listened when he listened. I stood up when he stood up.

I’d go to church every Wednesday and Sunday to hear my grandfather preach to his congregation. On Wednesday nights he’d let me ring the church bell, and since I was so small still I'd swing from the rope up and down with each pull. When he’d sit me down in the front pew with my grandmother he’d leave me with a pad and pen to draw and some of the Werther’s candies he always carried around in his pocket. After church we’d go to Don Rico’s for supper and I’d sneak Grandpa a scoop of ice cream when Grandma wasn’t looking.

About a year after I moved in with my grandparents my dad and mom decided to get back together. Even with my dad there I still held a soft spot for my Grandpa. My dad was my father, but for all intents and purposes my grandfather was my real dad. He taught me how to climb a ladder and was subsequently the one that climbed up to get me back down. He showed me how to whistle and blow bubbles with my chewing gum. He wiped away my tears and fed me pudding when I had my front teeth removed. He taught me faith and understanding, acceptance and forgiveness. He was my dad, my grandfather and my best friend.

When my parents remarried two years later we moved out of my grandparent’s house to a town a few hours away. Looking back the signs that everything was about to change were there from the beginning. Before we moved I saw Grandpa and Grandma talking to a realtor one day after school. Grandma had started getting angrier when we’d run into Grandpa at the drive in eating sundaes. Strange men in suits were constantly showing up at the farm to talk to the adults. Later my grandfather’s dog disappeared, but no one questioned it or went looking for him save for me.

When Grandpa was first admitted to the hospital I was the first to go in and see him. My cousin who worked there had to sneak me in through the service entrance since he wasn’t allowed visitors yet. I’m not sure how long he had been on chemo before he was so bad they had to put him under 24 hours surveillance since no one really thought I could handle that information at seven years old. I remember breaking into the hospital with my Grandma and cousin and walking through hallways I wasn’t supposed to see. It felt like an adventure full of perils. I remember looking at his hospital room door and thinking it was huge and ominous; that something hideous befitting my journey was awaiting me beyond its pink coating. When I finally entered he laughed pulling me into a hug and told me I was the first person he had wanted to see. It had been his demands that brought me to his bedside that day. There was no angry beast waiting for me on the other side of the door, but instead my favorite person in the whole world. I remember this entire first day, but I don’t remember how he looked in that bed.

My family, and I mean my entire family, spent the weeks leading up to my grandfather’s death in the waiting room outside of his hospital room. My grandmother rarely left his side, and the rest of us would take turns going in while the everyone else set outside hoping for some good news that would never come. October 8th was my grandmother’s birthday, but there was little celebration as we all knew it would be the last she and my grandfather would spend together. The next day when it happened I remember all of the adults rushing into the room and telling all of us kids to be quiet and behave. The older kids were told to keep an eye on us, but they were all just crying. I didn’t really get what was going on, but I knew it couldn’t be good.

They took us in one by one after he had passed. The room was filled with flowers and balloons.  The windows were all open and the sunlight streamed in making the room look happy. But for all the joy that the surroundings brought, the faces of my family members were anything but. Tear tracks marked every face but one. I have a picture in my head of what he looked like that day, but I know it is just the fantasy of a seven year old that just lost her best friend.

I still cry thinking about that day. I still cry thinking about his wake. Of course, after 19 years the thoughts of these days come fewer, the tears come less. Instead I remember his smile. Or the way he always smelled faintly of butterscotch. Or the amber ashtray he kept in the living room that never held a single ash because he hid his cigars and pipe from my grandmother in their later years. How his hair always reminded me of salt and pepper shakers. Or how much love you could see in his eyes when he looked at his wife and family. Or even the way he would run around with a five year old like he was a kid again.

It’s been 19 years, and come next October it will have been 20 years. Those are two very large numbers when you consider them in the spectrum of time. I’ve changed a lot over the last 19 years, I expect more to have changed by next. I’ve grown and I’ve learned. I’ve discovered myself and my beliefs. And I think I've become someone who my grandfather would be proud of. I’ve changed, but a part of me will always be the little girl stealing away after school on Tuesdays to giggle in the passenger seat of her grandfather’s Bronco on the way to the drive-in.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Geriatric Friends

It was early on in my adolescent life that I discovered my hatred for people my own age. At 4 years old I knew that no one under the age of 30 had anything of value worth saying. Like many still entrapped in their single-digit years my mother was my best friend; my Aunt Starr coming in a very close second. These two never failed to make me laugh. They could fill an entire afternoon talking about life, something that I at 4 years old had little experience of. Unlike my peers that waxed on about Barbie and the latest episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, my mother and aunt had real stories to tell me.

Both women had been divorced by the age of 33. One saddled with 2 children and an ex-husband that rarely even showed up on birthdays. The other remarried to a kind man, with no kids of her own and a free-spirited attitude toward life. Both worked hard. Both suffered at the hands of their exes.  Both came out the other end to continue on. I was fascinated with the idea of two people’s lives being so similar, yet their paths diverging in such a way it was unmistakable to see the differences among the two. Where my mother struggled to keep my sister and me in line and fed, my aunt just had to worry about her husband bringing home yet another assortment of garage sale finds. If there was one worry in her life it was my Uncle James’ obsession with getting a good deal. If there was a yard sale or flea market on the way home from work you could bet money on James coming home with a size 13 pair of sneakers no one needed or could even fit in. My mother had to call my father to remind him Christmas was coming up. Starr had to call my uncle to remind him he was due home five hours ago and to, “Leave the damned microwave cart at the garage sale. We have a built in unit for Christ’s sake! No, we won’t ever need it and neither will anyone else!”

Years later my sister would tease me for talking to strangers when my family would go out to eat. By the age of 6 I had realized that not only did my mother and aunt have fascinating stories, other older people would as well. When my family would go out for dinner, to a movie, to watch fireworks, I could be found sitting beside the oldest person in the vicinity enraptured by their tales. Often times they would talk about how adorable I was, and such a nice young girl. A child being interested in what an old person has to say is like crack to the geriatric. So used to being ignored by anyone with a pulse still above 40 beats per minute, having a little girl willingly walk up and start talking to them was a true treat. I enjoyed the smiles they’d get as I walked up, and to say all the accolades to my looks didn’t feed my ego would be a lie, but what I really wanted was to hear about their lives. Did you fight in a war? How did your knee go out? What is a colostomy bag, and why do you need it?

By the time I was a teenager I started to veer away from these hangouts with random old people. My friend had been the victim of a sexual predator by my first year of high school, and though I wholly blamed her for agreeing to go to a movie with somebody she met in a chat room I couldn’t help my sudden apprehension of talking to strangers, especially old men. They no longer just held a plethora of knowledge, they were also sexual beings. At some point in time Mr. Jenkins from down the road had slept with someone. With the help of Viagra perhaps he still did. I saw the way he looked at the old widow Mrs. Anderson. Gone were my dinnertime hangouts with the senior citizens at Denny’s early bird special. Now I could only talk to people I knew, which in turn greatly reduced my friend base.

This was how I met my mother’s boss, Mr. Patel. He was a nice old Indian man that seemed to take a shine to me right away. He was Hindu, something that I had never come across before and was fascinated by. This was right around the time Madonna decided to partake in eastern religions and Gwen Stefani started wearing bindis in her music videos. Here I was with an actual practicing Hindu that not only liked me but wanted to teach me everything he knew. It was like the heavens had opened up to say, “Nina, here is everything you could possibly ever want out of life.”

Mr. Patel started telling me about his life in India before he moved to America in the 70’s. I would come into work with my mother and spend the rest of the afternoon learning about how Mr. Patel had built his life up from scratch when he migrated. When my school had us pick a country to do a group project on I immediately chose India and begged my group to let me take over the religion portion of the paper. For a week I interrogated Mr. Patel about his religion, and though I was slightly off put by his pineapple ritual for opening a new business I started to see why all of America’s celebrities were jumping on the bandwagon. One day at the end of our interview session Mr. Patel told me I was an old soul; he could see it in my eyes. I had no idea what this meant, but I liked the sound of it. For years I had spent my life longing for the day when I would belong in a room of senior citizens, when I would be able to look at a young person and tell them, “Well, back in my day…” Now, here I was an old soul. I might look young, but inside I was already 85 years old.

I started to fantasize about what my inner 85 year old would do were I to let her out. Once someone get’s old their body starts to go and the mind is soon to follow. The trick is to find that sweet spot when you still have all of your faculties but look like you might be old enough to need an oxygen tank. My inner 85 year old was still a fully functioning human being, but she knew how to get her way. She’d walk into a store, grab a loaf of bread and jar of peanut butter and walk out without paying while smiling and waving to the store clerk. If anyone dared come after her for shoplifting she’d simply claim senility. She’d sit on her porch in the afternoons yelling at kids that dared walk on the sidewalk in front of her house. She’d tell her grand kids about her time spent traveling the railways with the hobos and the time she killed a man in Vancouver for looking at her funny. She’d only use a walker when family was over causing them to tell her to take a load off, they’d do those dishes that had been piling up for a week. It was going to be a sweet life, but for now I was only 14; I had to wait it out.

A year ago I turned 25 and had a veritable mental breakdown. All those years spent in the midst of the old had done nothing to quell my fear of death. Though I couldn’t wait to be a cute old lady like my grandmother, I had no desire to ever be so close to death. Turning 25 was the first milestone in my inevitable voyage to the great blackout. My inner 85 year old laughed at my realization, shaking her head that I had to have known this was coming. I was still alienated among people my own age, but the elderly I looked up to were a reminder of where I was headed. Secretly I had always assumed I’d die in a terrible accident before I was 30. Being old and going out in a slow and drawn out fashion had never occurred to me. I had always just seen the elderly as cuter, shorter versions of regular people. Not only was Mr. Jenkins schtupping Mrs. Anderson, he was also going to die.

In the fall of last year my mother called to tell me that Mr. Patel had passed away. He had a heart attack and was doing fine, but in the middle of the night something had gone wrong and he died. By this time my mother was no longer working for Mr. Patel, and I honestly hadn’t thought of him for years. Hearing about his death was depressing, but did it really affect me? Mr. Patel had once told me I had an old soul and that I had lived many lives before. If he was right was he really dead or just moved on into another form? According to my grandmother he’s probably in Hell since he wasn’t a Christian. In my own non-religious belief he’s just a body being reabsorbed by the earth that once created him- though I’m not really sure how that works with cremation. I like his idea better.

*****
Every morning on my way into work I pass this little old man on Lakemont who waves at every car that passes by him. Some people smile uncontrollably at seeing a baby being bounced on its father’s knee. Me, I smile whenever I see an old person happy. Yeah I fear death and now as a result I also fear getting old, but I have had a love of the elderly since I was 4 and it’s hard to break a habit you’ve had for that long. Every morning when I pass George, that’s what I’ve named him in my head, and he waves at me I instantly feel better. George can barely walk and has a hunch so bad it looks like he is constantly searching the ground for pennies, but still he goes for a walk every day to wave at all his friends.

On mornings where George is missing I spend my day worried that something has happened to him. Did he oversleep? Or maybe he just got up early; my grandmother has a habit of waking at 4am some days. If there were ever to be multiple days in a row with no George to greet me on my drive into work I’d probably pull over and knock on every door down Lakemont until I found his house to make sure he was alive and ok. “Please,” I’d say, “it’s the least I can do.” He’d smile and thank me for checking up on him. Later I’d come home to find a fruit basket with a note from George thanking me again for being so kind to a stranger. I'd quickly wonder how he got my address for the delivery before giving in to the chocolate covered strawberries.

This morning turning onto Lakemont I could see the familiar figure of George walking down the sidewalk. Blue and silver striped track suit? Check! Matching baseball cap? Check! Hunched over physique of Quasimodo? Double check! Pulling up the anticipation was eating away at me; my hand already at half mast waiting for George to look my way. A few feet away and my stomach was in butterflies, a smile already gracing my lips. And then he did it, he turned around. He turned his back to me! How can he wave and smile with his back turned to me? And that was it, wasn’t it? He wasn’t going to wave to me. I was snubbed. My geriatric friend denied me a simple gesture of the hand. I wanted to scream out the window, “I’m one of you! I’m an old soul God damn it! You can see it in my eyes!” Instead I kept driving, I lowered my extended arm and I glowered. I may never get that fruit basket from George, but you know what? When he finds himself “fallen and can’t get up” I’ll be the last person to show up frantic on his doorstep to make sure he’s ok. I may love cute old people, but I no longer love you George! Unless of course you wave to me again tomorrow, then we’re cool.