Grandpa Hank
Grandpa Hank could only have a designated number of shirts in his closet. Short-sleeved, long-sleeved, white summery cotton or thick plaid flannel, it didn’t matter: if you gave him one at Christmas and he deemed his closet at maximum organizational capacity, an existing one would have to be retired.
He was a retired Sunbeam factory worker, and before that had served in the navy in World War II. He had made it out of Germany with his mother as a child, just in time to be sent to fight against them. He was a gifted engineering student, spending hours of his childhood toiling away building model airplanes. There’s a story in my family that he was drafted the day after he had graduated high school and gotten accepted into MIT, though none of us have bothered verifying it, so it exists as part of the family mythology to pass down.
In another unverified story, one of the several war stories he offered up and liked to tell, probably forget he’d told, and retell, his ship left him on some island off the Pacific, and for a month he had to survive on his own. My brother had a notebook of doodles where he’d drawn a cartoon of this anecdote. Having no other frame of reference, whenever I hear the story, all I can picture is this crude sketch of my grandpa, a stick figure riddled with Malaria, surrounded by waves and waving from the top of a palm tree, coconut in the other hand, waiting for rescue.
When my parents wanted to describe Grandpa to people, they would simply say he’s German, which was supposed to convey serious attention to detail and to doing things ‘right’. The line was always blurry whether it was ultimately regarded as a passion for organization, a quirk, or something negative, an obsession, an inability to relax. One of his most notable hobbies in recent years was taking out our garbage, an anecdote my parents shared frequently at family get-togethers. ‘Taking out the garbage’, we would come to know, was an incredibly elaborate exercise in organizing the recycling.
It was Presidents’ Day. My brother and I, free from school, were sleeping in before our lunch with the grandparents. We’d go to Wendy’s, or Mickey’s, McDonald’s, Johnnie’s, or Russell’s — our Monday lunch spots that we kept in rotation. Monday lunch was a chance to visit our grandparents, ease back into the school week, and be the cool, mysterious kids of elementary and middle school for 45 minutes a week. At one of our earlier lunches, grandpa had mentioned coming over every week to ‘help with the garbage’. This didn’t mean taking out the trash, though. That was too simple.
That day I had woken up early, and saw his beige Mercury in the driveway. I didn’t spend that much time bonding with my grandpa, a thought that never escaped me when I thought of him. Despite the warm comfort of the house, I bundled up and decided it was about time to see what this was all about.
He was kneeling on a piece of cardboard that he had cut for himself as a makeshift knee rest against our tile patio. He sported his usual uniform: brown baseball cap, beige loafers, beige pants, beige windbreaker over a brown, green, and beige plaid flannel, and a toothpick hanging out of his mouth. He held a box cutter in his right hand and was surveying a cardboard box.
I stood, hands jammed into pockets, waiting. The top of the box was opened. Grandpa laid the box upside down so that its closed bottom faced upward and he cut across the clear packing tape, unleashing its underbelly. Then he cut in the same fashion along one of the box’s side edges, slowly, steadily, with precision. Now there were two cardboard pieces. He cut along another edge, separating another flap. He repeated this until all of the pieces that made up the box were separated.
Dad had told us how one time, in a total break from his perfect precision, Grandpa cut with too much force and slashed his leg. I pictured his face screwed up, a rare yelp, blood pooling across his pants, breaking up all of the beige on beige.
In another war story, his pant leg got caught during an underwater skills course and he almost drowned, before eventually freeing himself after who knows how many breaths. Meanwhile, my dad: black shearling coat, blue jeans, New Balance sneakers, spiked black hair, his neck adorned in a crystal (to ward off evil spirits), also sporting a toothpick from his mouth — ripped open other boxes with his hands, making a pile of them for Grandpa. His forceful, uneven tearing seemed to operate in a different world from Grandpa’s, and I was transfixed watching the two of them.
Occasionally Grandpa would grunt or breathe more heavily, but he never stopped to rest. He held up the pieces in front of him, sizing them up. He took a large piece and cut it almost perfectly evenly down the middle, so they made two new pieces that looked like the size of album covers.
“What’s he doing?” Dad had finished his ripping and was standing near me, watching a squirrel swing side to side from our bird feeder — he wasn’t a newbie to this, so he wasn’t as transfixed.
“You’ll see, Kemosabe.”
He cut the remaining pieces and made a pile. The two former side flaps couldn’t be cut into the uniform size, and so he cut them smaller and placed them on top of the pile, so it descended from bottom to top in size order. He continued with the remaining flat boxes until he was surrounded in a half circle of one-to-two-foot cardboard piles, all nearly the same height. He showed no sign of satisfaction, just kept moving mechanically. He grabbed a neatly rolled ball of twine. Dad walked over to him, like this was his silent cue.
Dad lifted a pile and Grandpa threaded the twine underneath, and dad placed the pile back down. Grandpa pulled on one end of the twine till they were equal lengths toward the sky, and then looped one side under the other and pulled tight, the first step in tying shoelaces. Again without any communication, my dad placed his finger to hold the twine down against the box and Grandpa knotted it and then made a bow. They repeated the process with a second piece of twine so the cardboard pieces were held together on all four sides. They continued with the rest of the piles, making little presents all across the patio. After hesitating to step in and mess up their choreographed dance, I started to do my dad’s job, lifting and finger placing. Apart from a “there you go” now and then, we worked in silence until we were surrounded in recyclable gifts.
We carried them to the front yard — I always liked carrying things so that people knew I was strong. After the last pile I watched him walk slowly back towards the house, expecting him to go inside and down a Sam Adams. He went to the back again, though, my dad trailing behind aimlessly. Grandpa took off the lid to our recycling bin, held on to my brother’s old hockey net for support, and stepped inside. He proceeded to stomp on our recyclables with what looked like a significant amount of force for someone who was almost 80. When this wasn’t enough, he would jump up and down.
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Dad searched for my reaction, said “Ain’t that something.” He laughed slightly and wandered inside.
So this was taking out the garbage.
It had been a while since I’d visited him. The last time, the first day of my summer break from college, I had flown into O’Hare and my parents picked me up and drove us straight to the hospital. He had fallen in his bathroom at home, had lay there for several hours before my grandma decided it was worth bothering us in the middle of the night over. An ambulance came and picked him up. When we got to the hospital, he was unconscious. I didn’t know if he was quite dead or alive, and I scanned my family’s faces for the answer. Eventually he woke up. He could tell we were there, but could only let out a barely audible sound in response. I remember my mom squeezing his finger, and him exerting an amount of effort to squeeze back that made his whole body collapse.
In order to get to the extended stay care facility parking lot, heading South, you had to turn left onto a wide median raised a substantial number of inches off the ground; there was no break in the road to offer reprieve from a great deal of bumping and jostling. We entered with a thud, and I thought of the vulnerable hips, achy knees, and arthritic joints, those of us no longer blessed with the relative ease of youth, and the abrupt greeting they must have received upon arriving at their new (temporary) home.
Dad and I walked through one set of automatic doors and curiously waited as the next refused to open. Dad took several large pumps of Purell, before I could tell him that it was a robber of our hands’ protectors, our good bacteria. The next set then opened, only after the first had completely closed — a measure, we would later realize, for preventing patient escapes. The walls, like nearly every other Dr.’s office, hospital, and nursing home I’ve ever been to, were a dull beige. We turned down one of the hallways towards room number lucky thirteen.
Grandpa was sitting in his wheelchair in the middle of the hallway, waiting. “Hi Grandpa Hank!” I offered. And then, “How are you doing?” before I could think about whether it was an inconsiderate question. He looked down at my newish red boots. “I see you’ve got some new clodhoppers, there.” My whole body warmed. “You could go to war in those.”
In addition to a hospital gown, he wore a pair of yellow supposed socks that looked to be made of old, bristly washcloths, with rubber anti-slip dots on the bottom. After a bit more small talk, we suggested we go relax in his room. He slid his hands down toward the wheels, exposing dark purple veins thinly protected by thin, papery skin. I thought of the sizzling rotisserie chickens my mom bought at the store.
During our visit, we caught him up with what was going on in our lives; they brought him his lunch, which he devoured, and he told me stories. One was about when him and my mom used to take sailing lessons — an idea that never ceased to make me laugh. He had somehow meandered into another story, in which he was driving a car of young women home in a blizzard.
“I was late coming home that night, and your grandmother wasn’t a happy woman.” My dad laughed.
“He’s hallucinating again,” he whispered to me.
We took him for a stroll around the joint, then returned to his room, got him some water. Dad turned on the tiny TV to TV Land, and we watched old westerns. It was cozy. We were finding much more to do than I’d worried we would. And he able to talk, and looked so much better than he’d had.
Later that visit he reached for something in the sky.
“Grandpa, what do you need?” I asked. He took his other arm, reached way above him, made a turning motion with his hand. It took me a minute to realize what was happening. “Looks like he’s operating a spaceship,” dad whispered. I laughed slightly, then felt bad. Grandpa Hank had projects he asked of us, too — or, rather, things that he used to do on his own but no longer could. My brother and dad got on ladders and cleaned his gutters. We moved and hung things in the basement, like his annual WWII airplane calendar, one of the few Christmas presents that he didn’t deem too much of an extravagance to accept. We would have to place any wayward bolt or nut back in its appropriate jar, hand-labeled and organized neatly in rows on shelves. Sometimes, he needed help reading numbers on receipts and paperwork so he could ‘crunch some numbers’ and pay taxes or bills. For this he would lead us into his office. We would sit there and examine receipts and I would always notice the postcard on his desk: four women in different, brightly-colored thong bikinis, backs to the camera, their heads turned back, smiling wide. This wasn’t a particularly rare or valuable possession, as you can find them in souvenir shops all over Florida and other beach towns. My grandfather, however, is a very put together and ‘appropriate’ man. He rarely, if ever, made crude jokes, at least never in front of the grandchildren, and most of our conversations tended towards practical matters. We had never even seen him in his pajamas, as us grandkids were never allowed to sleep over at their house. Certainly, this dirty postcard was the only acknowledgement of his sex life I had ever seen, other than the literal existence of my father, and formerly, his brother. I never knew what to make of it, but I always left his office with a confused smile.
He would eventually stop hallucinating, after time, therapy, and good Parkinson’s medication, and was able to return to his little beige ranch house with my grandmother.
There is a certain acute pressure, when a family member is nearing the end, to make sure you’ve had all the Important Conversations. From these conversations, you’re supposed to not only extract all the biographical dates and factual information, but also the formative anecdotes, the highlight stories to treasure and pass down for generations. In terms of the former, between all my family members I think we’re more than covered, but this whole phenomenon feels so disingenuous to me. There are many things I wish to ask Grandpa. I’m only somewhat tempted to ask more about the war, and risk reopening trauma. My main curiosities are even more uncomfortable. Were you happy (ever)? Did you love my grandma? More than my step-grandma? Do you have any regrets?
Prying into someone’s life whose opportunities were condensed, who had part of his story written for him, who likely fretted over financial security much more often than life’s deeper questions, of philosophy, art, of the meaning of it all, feels less like a Hallmark moment and more like rubbing your easier life in their face.
But Dad, for almost two years now, since the beginning of Grandpa’s more serious decline, just keeps visiting. He makes the hour-plus drive each way, and he finds things to talk about or to think about in the silence. He puts up with my grandmother’s recent and unprecedented shouting and unkind treatment toward him and Grandpa. My dad, who did not get to enjoy a close relationship with his emotionally closed-off, serious, German father in childhood; my dad, who felt Grandpa gave preferential treatment to his other son, the engineer, over the hippie musician. My dad, who drove me to and from my dance classes and sat through all my shows; my dad, who, when I asked him to teach me acoustic guitar, doubting the sufficiency of his self-taught, bass-focused skills, bought us a class together at the renowned Old Town School of Music. My dad just keeps visiting my grandpa, and posts pictures of him on Facebook, and finds his favorite kind of Lifesavers, and finds the kind of slippers he wants, and brings him a radio, which he says is too extravagant and rejects. My dad probably doesn’t force any Important Conversations or cheesy proclamations of love or regrets. He just makes sure to show up. He’s there.
When I tag along, which is not often enough, I notice the way that Grandpa looks at my dad — vulnerable, taken care of. Relieved.
