RIP

(november 11 2006)

Every November I step out in solitude, where the evening lights can bathe my sensibilities as I gaze longingly through the cool crisp sky. Stars swallow my thoughts as the sounds of the nearby interstate echo in the distance; somewhere some dogs bark, and my mind starts to wander. The night is young – two hours nigh of midnight – and each of the buildings across the street is alive with the comings-and-goings-on of young tenants and transient families. They distract me as I pick out the stabs of headlights weaving through driveways and up the street, until the block is silent once more. The muffled silence returns and the stars twinkle; a few leafy stragglers are breezily escorted to the ground; the lonely wail of a railroad horn echoes from downtown and sifts through the river valleys, right on schedule.

This is the Frankfort I live in on a certain, cool November night: the one I honor annually on my small, shared front porch as I light a cigar and ponder as it glows.

Grampa was scouted by the majors before he went to war. Cleveland, or so I’m told, but there isn’t much hard evidence to bear this out. What we do have is an old uniform sweater: green knit wool with orange varsity letters and a giant swirling question mark on the breast. It looked like it could have been a prop for Curly to wear in a Three Stooges short, but it was, indeed, the official garb of the Clearing (Chicago) Question Marks.

You know, times just didn’t rep any simpler than a ball-team in the Great Depression. The son of an immigrant Italian who helped develop the neighborhood, he went to school but didn’t take it too seriously. He was scrappy and self-sure. So it’s no surprise he went off to fight in Hitler’s Europe.

I never did grow the cajones to simply ask Grampa about the war. Well, I think I did once, but he pretended not to hear me. Of course, maybe he wasn’t pretending – his refusal to put up with hearing aids was legendary - but I’m not sure where I got the terribly clichéd notion of you just shouldn’t ask; he doesn’t want to talk about it. But the stories, oh, the family would sneak those out from time to time. The Battle of the Bulge and the Bronze Star. The Maiden statuette that some German nuns gave him for his part in rescuing them. The coin collection amassed abroad. The authentic 48-point US flag with patched bullet holes that he “saved” from the battlefield, triumphantly displayed in awed presence during holiday parties.

I gather the war is where he picked up the cigar habit – it befits an Army Sergeant after all.

I’m tempted to imagine him as the “Sarge” of Beetle Bailey fame but really, all I ever knew is what surrounded me, long after the war: the dashing post-war 25-year old marrying his sweetheart war-nurse movie queen. They were True Hollywood right down to the looks – a smashingly debonair couple. They shacked up in a tiny bungalow on Chicago’s southwest side, back in the booming old “Clearing” neighborhood of railroads and airplanes and prairies and houses you could touch by spreading your arms, and had a son. Nowadays we mockingly marvel at the willingness of Hispanics to sardine themselves into any rentable space, but my aunts and uncles lived this way 50 years ago: Two adults raised seven children in a house the size of most McMansion garages. Yeah, they were Catholic. Devoutly.

In my childhood Grampa was a saintly giant of a man: your basic full-blown Big-nosed Goofy-grin Gray-coiffed Santa-belly Jolly-crackin’ Italian. He reminds me of that internet sports guy from Brooklyn, but I never heard him utter a harsh word about anyone. He never swore, never got mad, never even scolded or corrected. The only times I ever saw him approaching a state that you and I might know as “upset” was when the White Sox yet again managed to choke in typical fashion while I visited some days after school. They were his passion - and he was the magic Grampa – always donning a grin and a hearty chuckle for his grandkids, for us, for me.

His backyard was respite and solitude. Even when my name was mud I couldn’t be in trouble at Grampa's House – punishment would wait 'till we got home. When the adolescent – and yes, even teenage – world seemed to be choking me with a battalion of hands, his backyard was sanctuary just a mere bikeride away. The smells of his cigars sometimes betrayed him hiding in the garage, listening to the Sox on the radio, tinkering with lawn mowers and all manner of junk, fixing things for neighbors. I’m surprised they haven’t put one of those brown honorary street signs up there with his name on it.

That’s where I get it from, you know. Literally, too: I still have a chair he gave me when he heard I was finally in my own place. Damn thing always wants to fall apart, but I can’t get rid of it. He saved it, for me.

I can only hope that I’m as bemused and silly in my old age as he. To take a bag of ready-mix one of my adult children may give me (for father’s day no less), and, not having a real need for ready-mix, decide to pour it in some ham cans left over from Easter. Add some pink paint and voila: custom pink garden hams! (Eat your hearts out, gnomes).

Yeah, my cousin said it best: “Grampa’s nutty.” But he was a wise and clever old guy with a mafiosi twinkle in his eye. And we all wanted those soda-can airplanes and homemade birdhouses and yeah, if you needed a lawnmower fixed… just follow your nose and seek out the cigars.

He’d laugh when we kids would make ourselves dizzy-sick running around the support columns in the basement. And he always saved plenty of cigar tubes for us to keep dimes in and play Wolverine. That was the Grampa of my youth: Saint Anthony P. L. I always made sure to point out his house when our class passed it during our walk-a-thons.

Nowadays I look back with adult glasses, and I’m awestruck. I knew Grampa had to be tough. You don’t become a Sergeant in the Army in the Battle of the Bulge, and raise seven kids in a brick shoebox, without breaking some eggs and cracking some heads.

I see the blue-collar businessman, the Philips 66 company liner. An honest guy making a living, running a gas station on the literal edge of town, putting his seven kids though school - eldest through college, youngest at least through catholic elementary. I think of the old cars, the sensational grandfather clock, the first household on the block to get a color TV. But things got tough. Schools were expensive; high school meant public school. Business was tenuous. It was the way the swinging sixties begat the post-nuclear families. Times became trying…

…none more so than when Ron died. The youngest, a child of the free-love free-drugs nuclear-detonation society. The youngest, by over 20 years. The youngest, lost and forgotten. Drowned in a public pool. Snuck in while toasted out of his mind one night, abandoned by his stoned and terrified friends as he cried for help. I met one of them accidentally, 20 years later. He didn’t know. I didn’t know. And then my dad had to explain to me why not every bum you meet behind the 7-11 is as innocent as he looks.

But I can’t imagine Grampa’s pain after that. Don, the next youngest by 2 years, wasn’t doing much better – he hadn’t learned, or was too scared - and was kicked out of the house and out of mind. I remember it had something to do with the back-end of a car I saw sticking out of a house (up the stairs?!) one morning when my mom dropped my dad off at work before school. It looked strangely familiar under the pile of bricks.

They say my grandma’s heart was broken; she died before I barely really knew her.

The first kid went off through College to live distant and large as a globetrotting executive. The youngest never graduated high school. The others – my dad, my uncles, my aunts - are scattered somewhere between, in and around Chicago, to mixed and varying degrees of human successes and failures. It must have been hard for him to face the changing times: being a stalwart Catholic household with kids marrying young, having children almost out of wedlock, marrying into foreign situations and problems and crises of faith waiting in the wings. You can survive the depression, the war, the sixties and the fuel crisis, but they never prepare you for the problems that hurt the worst, right under your feet.

Cracked heads and broken hearts. Tough love: Don is still alive; a no-nonsense tough-luck guy with a heart of gold who doesn’t lay blame on anyone but himself. We need more guys like him. We need more honesty like that. I don’t mention these issues as so much dirty laundry to be aired like tawdry gossip. Nowadays, it’s all commonplace; back then you had to be tough to face it all. We’re only human, even the best of us. It was tough to see my Grampa as human, as someone I could relate to and learn from. He was always so much larger than life. The real stories lie with my relatives, in their closets. You know the lessons are there, but they never talk about the details much. Not to us kids, anyway.

I missed out on a lot, later. I recall for a short time when I was in college, he used to have dinner at his house for my dad and uncle’s families (theirs being the closest ones). We’re talkin' huge, heaping piles of spaghetti he would often make himself, with a block of parmesan you had to grate yourself, and big chunks of deli italian sausage in homemade red sauce. Mmmmm. I was there for a few of those sacred meals but it always seemed I'd hear about missing even more. When I left school and moved back home, these rituals ended, until I moved to KY a couple years later. Never understood that. I miss that big yellow-orange ceramic spaghetti bowl.

It was always great to see him showered with love and gifts during Christmas parties. He was such a fun-loving man, wearing google-goggles and sharing his laundry list of “Grampa Jokes” with everyone. The next time he told it was always just like the first time - you never could get "1 and 1" right - and that was just the tip of the iceberg.

In December 2000 Anna and I made it to town in a whirlwind, for what would prove to be one of the last big family Christmas parties, before I and the rest of “the cousins” would semi-permanently scatter to families and jobs and homes of our own. It wasn’t possible for me to make it until the last-minute, after scrambling to fill a work shift. So after plugging away my weekend morning at Best Buy, we left Lexington and one of the first places I went that Saturday afternoon upon arriving in Chicago was Grampa’s. He hadn’t been expecting us, so he was surprised and happy to find Anna and me at the door for a private visit. He’d just finished a cigar out in the backyard and was coming in. We were sitting around when Anna went to find his second wife, and he looked at me.

“Your dad said you had to work. You got out of it, huh? How’d you get here?”

“I drove.”

He nodded, first surprised, then approvingly. “What did you drive?”

I pointed out open front door: “My car.” A well-worn and abused 1988 Thunderbird sat tired in the snow-covered street.

He looked outside, shook his head, and smiled. “You’re a brave man if you keep driving that thing up here all the time!”

I just chucked and told him not to worry. “Eh, it runs fine enough. I know her inside out. Besides, that car might be 13 years old, but it beat all the newer ones that were dead on the side of the road on our way in”. It was true, and I loved that car – but what I didn’t tell him was that there might be a nice antifreeze ocean in front of his house once I left. Oops.

“Ha! Well that’s good then!” He smiled broadly. “I think I’m gonna hafta leave you my bronze star for keeping that old tank around.” I was amused – his WWII bronze star was surely a true prize. I had never heard him volunteer a war reference on his own either. I didn’t think he really meant it – just another Grampa joke.

The solemn truth of it didn’t hit me until I told Anna about it on our way to my uncle’s for the party. He was acknowledging his old age. And he seemed to be welcoming the thought of passing. That was out of character.

There were more visits over the next couple years whenever I could afford to make them, but the car never made it back. He was amused to see its replacement in August 2002. “I thought it was black?”

“That’s Anna’s car.”

“But it’s another Thunerbird? I thought yours was blue. But you said you didn't drive it.”

“Yeah, but this one is newer. I still have the old one though.”

He smiled. “Yeah, I owe you the Bronze Star for that, don’t I?”

Again, about the bronze star, two years later. We sat and talked for a while, but mostly just enjoyed each other’s company for a bit, relaxing…

Relaxing: on the swing in the backyard in the summer. He was out for birds and I used to hate the blasted things for mistaking my blue car for a lavatorial pond, but Grampa would love where we live now. Finches, Sparrows, Robins, BlueJays, Cardinals… even hummingbirds. During the winter, inside, listening to the clock while we chatted. Whenever a train approached at the end of the block, I had to suppress the urge to rush out of the house to see it as I usually managed to do. Time was more valuable now, and the tocking of the grandfather clock punctuated it serenely.

Serenity: What he had earned. He didn’t like to go out much anymore, which was a point of family contention more often than not. Concerned for his and others' saftey despite being accident-free, he gave up his driver's license, and you went to him. And you went willingly for the jokes and the hearty handshakes and the reassurences and the wisdom and the genuine interest in your life.

I’ll never forget that day, back in August 2002. He looked somehow down, but was still his boisterous self within - you just had to pry it out. Looking to cheer his spririts as we prepared to leave, I commented that he was in remarkably good health, and doing pretty well for himself.

“Feh, you don’t want to outlive all your friends, Tony. There’s no fun in that. Nobody to talk to anymore.”

At first I was taken aback, but then again, he was right – he’d lived on that block his whole life. But you couldn’t recognize it anymore - the families changed, and then moved away. The new neighbors weren’t as friendly, weren’t home as often. There weren’t any more lawnmowers to fix.

The local priests he’d befriended had moved or passed on, and the new pastor had alienated many people. Grampa himself had quit ushering a few years ago, and the obits grew longer and the pews emptier. Even Catholicism seemed to lose its sustenance.

I didn't know what to say, other than the simple truth: “Well, we’re all glad you’re still here.”

He smiled and squeezed my hand firmly. “Thanks for visiting me, Tony. And Anna”. (He'd welcomed her in the moment he met her years ago when she proved to be a Sox fan).

Something blipped in my head as I walked down the steps out to the street. Geez, that’s morbid, what the heck? I squashed it instantly. I got in the car and looked back at the house. My Magic Grampa’s House. He stood in the doorway briefly, and then went back inside.

Anna and I were helping a friend run a booth at a model train show in Cincinnati. It was the annual November show, full of lights and sounds and colors and children anticipating the holidays. I’d taken a break from manning my friend’s modest sales tables to go film the impressive operating layouts for a while. When I got back, Anna was waiting for me with a concerned expression.

“Your dad called. He says it’s important, you need to call him back”.

I shrugged. “Pfft. When does he ever call? The only thing that’d be important enough for him to call is if his computer’s messed up, or... –“

I broke off. I suddenly heard it again – that quiet sad voice I heard going down the steps back in August: This is the last time you'll ever see him. Oh, no. It was right. How, oh how on earth did I know? And why didn’t I listen? I grabbed the phone.

“Tony, Grandma Bea called me this morning. Grampa died in his sleep. Peacefully. Had a smile on his face. Um, I guess we’ve still got things to do, but take your time getting here”.

I took my time. It rained epically for the entirety of the weekend. When we got back to Frankfort, the basement had flooded, but that didn’t compare to the tears in my heart. We sopped up the mess, called the landlord, sent emails to our bosses and turned right back around to the interstate, Chicago-bound.

I’ve done a lousy job recanting the stories, here. Looking back to the wake, there were tons of them; I probably could go on for hours. But in spite of what he thought, Grampa left lots of friends behind. They all came to see him with a smile on his face, ready to be sent to heaven in his White Sox jacket, carried by the flock of birds on his casket. Grandma Bea did him proud. The service was beautiful; catholic ceremonies always are. The Armed Forces sent a representative - he had passed on Veteran's Day after all.

He left behind a legacy of work ethics and sacrifices; of bad jokes, fat dogs, concrete hams and birdhouses; of tinkerers and sports fans; of children and families that argue but cut the crap when it counts. He left behind a legacy of love and hard knocks and life lessons.

He left me his Bronze Star (and I still have the car that “earned” it for me. See, he’d known for years I would get it for no special reason other than luck of being the first Lucio grandson, but he gave me a better story to share. He was sneaky and generous like that).

He was three parts Saint, one part SOB. He was one of a kind, and I could never hope to live up to his name that I share - I’d do well to even get halfway.

I miss you, Grampa.

*****

My Garcia Y Vega is almost finished; the smoke-induced memories bathe and soothe the wetness of the air, of my face. I leave the glowing stub for him in my college coconut ashtray, here on the porch. The door squeaks loudly as I pause, breathing in the cool November air once more. The smell of cigar smoke follows me inside the house where my wife and daughter are waiting.