Family Stories - Part One

When I was in college I would stop by my grandfather’s house on the way to class every few weeks to pay him a visit. My grandmother had died of a stroke a few years before and, although my uncle now lived with him, he was alone for much of the day. His cataracts had failed him many years earlier - and the subsequent surgeries had only served to make his vision far worse –so he spent his days largely confined to his house in near darkness.

His only outings were to walk his daily mile. For this he had mapped out a path from the front porch, around the oak tree in front of the flower beds, back up the driveway, and then across the sidewalk to the porch again. It was a small route that the average person could easily have walked in under fifteen seconds but took him at least three times longer. He had calculated the distance of this walk and determined that if he did fifty-seven laps it would equal a mile. And that’s what he did. Fifty-seven laps. Every day.

The daylight probably did him some good given that all he could see inside his house were the blurry outlines of the furniture and walls. I would have expected him to keep the curtains and blinds open to see better but he didn’t. No matter the season or time of day he kept them sealed tight. The house sat in grim darkness. Perhaps it wouldn’t have helped anyway.

To read something, he needed the print to be produced in three or four-inch block letters and held up close enough to his face to smell the ink. Even then, there was a little guess work to be done. Next to his telephone sat a notebook with important phone numbers written with this over-sized script, in case of an emergency.

He spent much of his day listening to CNN or slipping on headphones to listen to books on tape. An organization for the blind sent him new tapes each week. He particularly enjoyed the historical pieces. I assume he listened to each book only once but to hear to him recount the lives of the Wright brothers or George Meade in excruciating detail would leave you to wonder if perhaps he had them on a continuous loop. It’s odd but, at eighty-two years old, his mind had slipped in so many ways yet he was a living encyclopedia when it came to telling stories about our nation’s history.

These were not the only stories he loved to tell. He also enjoyed spending what seemed like hours-on-end talking about the people, places, and events from his own life. His own history. I didn’t recognize many of the names, and only a small handful of the places, so I generally received these stories with mild interest. In all honesty, they bored me.

He would sit across from me in his chair just talking away about something from the deep past while I sunk into the couch letting my eyes wander around the room. Shelves and shelves of books, mostly mysteries left behind from my grandmother’s vast collection. And owls, too. There were owls everywhere, also left behind. Not one for decoration and unable to see any of it anyway, I’m sure the idea of changing a single thing in that room over the past four years had never occurred to him. The only changes I was able to notice, as I sat distracted from his stories, was the fact that a small number of things were missing – taken by siblings, children, and grandchildren as mementos of my grandmother.

Eventually my attention would move to the cat. I don’t remember its name so much as its smell. Probably the smell came from the neglected litter box that sat in the back of the pantry but I would forever associate it with the cat itself. Small and gray, it seemed to have a never-ending flow of hair tufts falling out; leaving themselves to blow across the faded brown carpet- stained from years of grandchildren, dogs, and, yet, other cats. As with each the cats that preceded it, my uncle had played rough with it from the time it was a kitten and now the slightest movement of a foot or arm would serve only to invite an ensuing attack of claws and teeth. I sat motionless. Except for my eyes.

It was easy to let my eyes explore the house while my grandfather continued on with his stories. I was nothing more than a faint blob in his distant sights. “Huh!” I would respond from time-to-time. “Really!” It was rather like being on the receiving end of a one-sided phone conversation. Sit and let your mind wander, providing an occasional mutter of comprehension or surprise to satisfy someone else’s need to be heard.

All-the-while, my grandfather sat and shared stories about the Browns and Bakers and Hasses that stretched across Middle America from North to South, Michigan to Arkansas. He talked about marriages and children, sicknesses and deaths, good times and trouble. He shared his history.

I didn’t realize it at the time but he was sharing my history too. And now, I couldn’t tell you a single solitary piece of it.

All I have to tell is what that house looked like. How it smelled. How I wished more than anything he would turn down the television and open up a window. How vicious those cats could be.

Everything I knew – everything I cared about – came from the present. Not the past.

That’s how youth works.