I don’t remember anything about him, my grandfather, either.  I have only the words of my parents, and since mom rarely talks about her father, my only real knowledge comes from a story my father tells.

“He loved that house.  It was on the corner of a big farm, and the owner had worked out an arrangement with your Grandpaw where he could live in the house and help farm the land.”  I nod.  I understand sharecropping, half a step from slavery but an honest way for a man to earn a meager living in hard times.  The Depression made callused hands a badge of honor, feed-sack clothes a sign that you were living better than you might.

“Eventually, of course, he got too old and sick to work.”  My father pauses, remembering.  “He was afraid that he would have to move his family, and he didn’t have any place to go.  He went to the landowner and asked him about it.  He was a good man, though, and he told your Grandpaw that after so many years of hard work, he had nothing to worry about.  ‘Y’all can stay in that house as long as I live,’ he said.

“It was sometime after you were born,” looking at me, “you must have been about three or four — the owner died.  His son inherited the property, and he had big plans for it.  Pretty soon your Grandpaw found out he couldn’t live there any more.

“We had the old van by then, so we drove up there to help them move.  The whole time we were there, hauling furniture out the door and driving it to the new place, your Grandpaw just sat in his chair and rocked.  He never lifted a finger to help us, never said a word, just rocked.  When nothing was left but his chair, he stood up, walked out to the van, and buckled up.

“At the new place we unloaded his chair first.  He found a place for it in the living room, and he sat down and started rocking.  We unloaded everything in the van without a word or a bit of help from him.

“He never did recover from losing the old house.  It was just a few months later that he died, and he spent most of it rocking in his chair.”  Mom has been silent this whole time, thinking about a man I know I met, a man who must have held me in his arms, but whom I cannot remember.  I know the house they moved to.  It was a run-down turn-of-the-century house purchased by my cousin, and I remember looking up into an elderly male face against a backdrop of tattered ceiling.  I do not know if that was my grandfather; it may have been.

The only clear memory I have regarding my grandfather takes place after his death — how long after, I can’t say.  I was sitting on the back porch steps, crying, because my young mind (how young?  4?  6?) had realized my few memories of my grandfather would be lost to me by adulthood.  I buried my head in my arms, sobbing. 

I was right:  the memory of that realization is burned into my mind, but the memory of my mother’s father is only a shadow… perhaps less.That must have been my first glimmer of understanding about death.  All of my grandparents are gone, now, and I don’t fully understand it yet.

* For those interested in the Depression, you’ll be doing yourselves a favor to stop by exit78.com and look at Mike Goad’s “Eyes of the Great Depression” series.  My favorite is #004.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language. — Henry David Thoreau

Great-great-granddad

My great-great-grandfather, by all accounts, didn’t put much stock in photographs.  Too new, too strange.  It was almost indecent, making pictures of people like that.  He’d heard that kings and princes and such had painters to come and make pictures of them, but that was painting, that was different.  It took a while… several days, by his reckoning… and, well, that was for kings.  Like wearing those bright-colored tights — fine for fine folk, but not for him.  These photographs, somehow, were worse.  Too quick.  They didn’t take so long to make, and so people were going around wasting them on regular folks.  That just couldn’t be right, could it?

He didn’t hold with fairs and festivals and the like, either.  Too much like carnival.  Oh, yes, he’d heard stories about carnival.  A visiting preacher had spoken one Sunday morning about the immoral ways of the old country and how every year they had revelry so scandalous that it took forty days to atone for it afterward.

But… well, the cantaloupes had done so well this year, and he couldn’t have eaten them all before they went to rot.  Wastefulness was sinful, so he’d better find someone who could put them to use.  Best place to do that is the fair… and then people got to talking about how large and tasty-looking the cantaloupes were, and the next thing you know, they’d sort of taken him by the elbow and shooed him over to a table where he could set down his cantaloupes and let Mister Somebody-or-other in what looked like a city-bought suit — at least $25, his cousin had said — poke them and thump them and make “aha, mm-hmm” sounds under his breath.

And then they handed him a piece of bright blue ribbon, smiling and clapping him on the back and shaking his hand.  He shoved the ribbon into the back of his belt; perhaps the wife could use it on the new dress she was sewing.

A photographer appeared, tripod over his shoulder.  The small man hustled my twice-great-grandfather over away from the crowd; his young assistant practically shoved the cantaloupes into his arms.  “Hold that,” the photographer called, spreading the legs of his tripod and ducking under the cloth cover.

Well… they were all so determined, and friendly, and it had been a memorable day, and perhaps the grandchildren might want to remember what their grandfather looked like… but he didn’t have to enjoy all the attention.  No, sir.  No need for enjoyment of it, not at all.

They were fine cantaloupes this year, though.

Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, “By jove! I’m being humble,” and almost immediately pride — pride at his own humility — will appear. — C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters