Grandpa

 By Diane Thaine Adams

Lodged in the vaults of memory, amongst dusty files of forgotten days, is the living image of a man, as clear in my mind as if I were seeing it with my eyes. My grandfather is standing on a deeply forested hillside. The dappling sunlight is playing in his silver hair. His face, gaunt and ribbed by illness and age, is strangely boyish, the eyes alight with mischief. His eyes are not those of an eighty-year-old man, they are the eyes of a twelve-year-old rogue. Having been ordered by doctors to remain in bed until healed from a recent surgery, he had suggested to me that his favorite walk would be just the thing to promote a more rapid recovery. Despising advice in all its manifestations, he often would choose his course based seemingly on doing the opposite of whatever he had been directed to do.

The product of wealthy and etiquette-oriented Baltimore aristocracy, my grandfather earned the reputation of being a "black sheep" early in his career. It was expected of him that he would attend the university founded by one of his forefathers, and that he would marry a woman of equal rank and prestige afterwards. I came across a letter one day, written to my grandfather by his father, concerning his decision to quit college in order to run away with what my great-grandfather termed, "the trollop daughter of a Maryland tomato farmer", which is, to my knowledge, the last communication he ever had with his father. Disinherited and left to support his new wife at the beginning of the depression years, my grandfather got a job making maps for the predecessor of the C.I.A. With an attitude of "I’ll show them" he successfully managed to raise a family, and make quite a reputation for himself in his field.

I can remember the combative atmosphere which always surrounded my grandfather. With his marriage having soured somewhat, he quit his job, and took to drinking Papst Blue Ribbons from morning until night, delivered from the local market on palettes. Grandmother would sulk around the house, complaining about his drinking, choking in the thick blue haze of cigarette smoke that filled their home like ringing songs fill a church. For ten years he sat and drank, chain smoking, and hardly ever leaving his room. Family meetings were held; what to do about grand-pa was the topic of discussion. The more he was urged to quit drinking, the more he drank, until I’m not sure that he doesn’t hold some sort of record for the number of beers consumed in a ten year period. Then one day, to everyone’s surprise, and lasting remark, he bathed (something he had refused to do for years), shaved, and put on a clean shirt. According to my grandmother, he came out into the living room, announced that he wasn’t going to have another beer, and that he thought a vacation was what they needed. He never did touch alcohol again, but it was his decision, in his own time and way, and heaven and earth couldn’t move him until he had made up his own mind.

An avid reader, and ready debater, especially when the subject of politics was introduced, my grandfather fascinated me with his endless supply of stories, some of which were in retrospect unfit for the ears of a young girl. He never made bones about speaking his mind, whether he was telling his granddaughter about the time he was caught handling the family maid in his teenage years, or telling some other impressionable youngster that the best way to know if you should do something is to do it and see what happens. A philosopher and a dreamer in the same package, his opinions would sometimes run counter to each other in their impetuosity. Once in an argument with my father over the efficacy of democracy, my grandfather stated that people who were not college educated should not be allowed to vote (seemingly forgetting that he himself fell into that category).

My grandfather has been gone for some years now. Although he was a chain smoker for more than fifty years, he characteristically refused to die of lung cancer, as everyone had predicted he would. Instead he just dwindled slowly, afflicted with one vague illness after another. One aspect of the man that never did change, however, was that mischievous glimmer, always there on one level or another, in his eyes. As I remember him, in the vivid chapters of my memories, I can watch him striding up that hillside, ashen but cheerful, taking a perverse delight in doing what he shouldn’t, waiting for me to follow, with the sunlight in his hair.