I had intended to write a very different 'blog tonight. I was going to call it "Why Jurassic Park Is Like Christianity" and talk about some of the more subtle themes of the novel in relation to some ideas I've been having in regards to my faith lately. It was off to a fairly decent start, and I may still publish it in the future, but not today.
I just got a phone call from my sister. My grandfather may die tonight.
It seems kind of pointless to try and continue my earlier post because I can't really stay focused on where I was going with it. I mean, I know what I was trying to say with it overall, I just can't really remember how I was going to get there. Or why I thought to write about that today. Or who among you would really care.
But then I remembered that this is my 'blog and I can do whatever I want with it. This is a weird situation for me to be in and I don't really know what to do. I'm sad about it, sure, but he's been sick for a long time and I've been sad about it throughout. I'm sure there's a slow-burning emotional fuse somewhere that's bound to reach the end at some point, but we're not there yet, so, for right now, I just want to tell you about my grandfather.
My grandfather (this is my dad's dad, by the way) has always been kind of a mystery to me. In a lot of ways, he's something of a static character in my personal history, but in a lot of others, he's a really important figure for me. It's difficult to characterize my relationship with him because he was never exactly a relational kind of person. I'm almost reluctant to write about it because of how easily it might come across that my grandfather was some cold and distant man who never really had much interest in the lives of his children. I don't necessarily see him as such, but by the same accord, he wasn't really outgoing or personable, either. The best illustrations I can think of for my grandfather are something like a really big tree or a boulder: they don't move around much or make a lot of noise, and they'd probably just be boring if it weren't for their size and how long they'd have to have been there and how much would have had to happen for them to get so big.
I really wish my dad were here. He's a lot better at this kinda stuff than I am. Well, in the "remembering things about people" sense, like when they were born and where they lived and so on. He's also better with minor characters and details, though it comes across kinda dry. I'm the better communicator between the two of us, but I think it's only because I'll say anything just to hear the sound of my own voice. I'm not sure what that says about either of us, nor am I certain that it's anything particularly good. Essentially, my dad is better at remembering facts and I'm better at conveying them. Between the two of us, you'd probably get a better sense for who my grandfather is than you will here. But here's what I do know about him:
My grandfather was born on a farm and couldn't go to college because his family couldn't afford to send him. He was good with numbers and drafting and would have done well to become a mechanical engineer (something my uncle went on to do instead), but he got married and joined the military in the height of World War II. He was an army mechanic and worked on fighter planes, and was stationed in Colorado. He never went overseas. He owned and operated a full-service gas station in Maypearl, Texas from at least the time my father was a child, probably even before then. He also owned farmland that he leased out to ranchers where he dug three man-made ponds for the cattle to drink out of and stocked with fish for his family to catch. He would travel in the summers with my grandmother and her brother and his wife, always by car, and never for more than a few days at a time.
To go through all my family photos, you'd hardly know I had a grandfather at all, but you'd wonder who that man was that kept showing up in the background of all those pictures. I don't mean this to sound as insulting and/or derogitory as it probably does; I say it with no malice or derision whatsoever. In fact, were one to evaluate my own photographic history, one might discover the same to be true of me. In a world where most of my "friends" have close to (and for many, north of) 1,000 pictures of themselves tagged on Facebook, I hover somewhere in the low 150's and many of them don't even have me in-frame.
And yet, my grandfather was also a man of many surprises. In hindsight, his generosity was particularly astounding. When I was six or seven, I would sometimes "work" at his gas station for the astronomically over-inflated price of $20 a day (plus whatever sodas and candy I consumed from his vending machines). I don't know how many times he would fix an inner tube for free before he actually charged someone for the patch, but there were plenty of kids in the neighborhood who rode through the streets on bikes with his kindness in the tires. There always seemed to be a pack of stray dogs that frequented his shop for the scraps left over from his lunch, and equally as many stray farmers who would drift through to say hello. Some were regulars with their own chairs that had to be vacated when they showed up. Some made special guest appearances that would be talked about in conversations between visits. But it still amazes me how much life and warmth was always available in an otherwise dirty and dreary concrete cell.
Those of you who have seen it know I drive a very nice car. I wish I could say I keep it as clean as such a nice car deserves to be, but I don't. It's easy to get comfortable and feel like you deserve nice things whenever nice things are given to you. And my car is definitely a nice thing. And it was definitely a gift. My grandfather gave me that car when my own was barely drivable. I had an old Mazda MX-6 that, while it was a neat, fun car for a 17 year-old to get as a hand-me-down from his father, had become something of a road-hazard-on-wheels by the time I was 23. I can still remember the pure, unadulterated misery of driving around in 100+ degree temperature with my heater running full-blast just to keep the engine from shutting down because that's what happened if you drove it for more than ten minutes at a time. To refer to my grandfather as stoic would be like calling the Grand Canyon "a fairly large hole in the ground." Conversation with him was usually anemic and could be summed up in three questions: "How's work/school," "How's <family member's name> doing," and "How's your car running?"
One day, after driving my sister's car to Dallas for a family visit and answering his three questions, my grandfather told me he would be giving me his car. It was a brand new Ford Five Hundred and had maybe 5,000 miles on it. It had leather seats, a CD player (2005, and I was still driving around in a car with a tape-deck), a working air conditioner, and, most importantly, an engine that wasn't on the verge of spontaneous combustion. I didn't really know what to say. It would be like taking a Haitian whose mud hut had been destroyed in an earthquake and giving him a condo in the Domain. "Thank you" was all I could come up with that seemed appropriate, because it's difficult to gush to a person who shuts down gratitude with a low-rumbling "Aww..." and a wave of his hand.
It was a gesture I'd seen a million times before, given mostly to the kids who tried to give him money for their newly-patched bike tires. It was an odd gesture, and it had a tendency to make things awkward. He wouldn't look you in the eye and he'd usually just go back to what he was doing, as though it had barely warranted a break in his daily routine. At the same time, though, it served to purify the kindness of the thing he had done because you understood that there would be no further discussion of payment and certainly no actual exchange. It was a kindness born of need and paid for out of wealth, not wealth built by petty greed or sophisticated financial manipulation but through the integrity of an honest day's work.
Somewhere in my mother's house is the first sign he ever put up over his shop. It says "WIGGINS SERVICE STATION" in big, bold, blue letters, weathered by age and many years of use. Sometime during high school and later during college, it hung over my bed, one part family heirloom and one part hilarious double entendre. But the more I think about that sign in the context of who my grandfather was, the less I see it as a joke and the more I understand it as a valuable description of the man himself. I saw his brand of "service" as a child. I saw it as an adult. I saw it in between during the years when my grandmother was ill. I saw it in hindsight after she died; in all the ways he fought to keep her at home and by his side until he just couldn't take care of her anymore. I never talked with my grandfather very much, but his life spoke volumes to me. Any idiot can inherit a fortune and piss it all away but, regardless of what happens tonight, I hope I live up to his legacy.
I love my grandfather and I wanted to share him with you while I still can.
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