Up until yesterday, I could boastfully claim that all of my grandparents were still living independently. Yesterday afternoon my maternal grandfather--my Grandpa "Tuff" or "Gramps" or "Gordon" as I used to call him as a kid died peacefully at the age of 81. He was to be 82 on August 25th. Those people who know me well know that Gramps figures so prominently in my childhood and that I claim him as THE father figure in my life. There were other males and men, but there was only one Gramps. He was complicated, flawed, intense and absolutely human. He also taught me some of the core values I have carried on with me: the true meaning of unconditional love, acceptance, tolerance and appreciation...
I understand that Tuff was different for different people. In his lifetime he was a son, brother, husband, father, lover, employer, employee, friend, nemesis, grandfather and great-grandfather. He collected people and it was his appreciation for the kookiness and genuine humanness of people that fostered his collection. While he appeared to live a relatively simple life--he never ran for office or tried to build an empire in the traditional sense of the word, he also lived with great determination, intensity and independence. He was a character from a Keasey novel or a Shepard play; he WAS the Beat generation as far as I could tell. He could be jovial and loving, but he could also be belligerent and ill-behaved. He was part myth, part fiction, and part legend--all wrapped in a very real, human, accessible man.
He could be impatient and crabby, challenging in his stubbornness and wrapped in his own world. He could also be the first person to show up and help, work an endless day at hard labor, give generously to anyone who asked, was the greatest of story-tellers, and for one little girl growing up on the side of a mountain--her first soul mate.
Grandpa appreciated people and life in all its messiness and chaos. In my last chat with him--only a few days before he died, we talked about ordinary things, history, connections: a road trip he'd taken out to Indiana when I was a harried young mother in my mid-twenties with three babies (He remembered becoming instant buddies with the "good old boy" who lived next door and they sat out in the Indiana humidity sipping coffee or beer and telling stories); we talked about the last weeks and days of his mother's life, he asked how old my kids were and we talked about food. I sat with him while he ate his lunch and he ate everything; I grinned at the fact that he commented on how much he still enjoyed the big glass of milk (something I too imagine I will never lose.) To the very end, he was living completely in the present; completely in the life that was his own and a life that had been full and complete.
I will never know if Gramps had any regrets; I will never know sides of him that other people saw; I know for a fact that different people experienced different sides of him. Even among his grandchildren, we all experienced a different sort of man. For me, just for me, he was a perfect grandfather for me. The most peaceful moments of unconditional love I remember from my childhood were times I spent with Gramps. He was a haven; a man who taught me things and shared skills and stories that went beyond gender and time; he always had time for me when I came hiking up the hillside in search of a chat. He is the person who taught me how to drive, fly fish, butcher a deer, and gut a fish--of course I have not used all of these skills in my adult city life!
He was also the one person from my youth who fostered and inspired my love of language and words. With songs, and stories and poems--endless puns and rhymes, I learned how to play with words from Gramps--how to take possession and twist them around and extract the humor and pleasure from a living and ever-evolving language. I learned from him that everyone had a story and that everyone had not only the potential to be the hero in his or her story, but also the enemy, bad guy, protagonist and minor character in everyone else's story. It was all in how you spun the tale. In the literary world I inherited from Grandpa Tuff, people could be anything and everything and everything that happened in life only made the stories better and the songs richer.
With Tuff, there was always time for a story. "What's your hurry?" he would say and whenever I was with him, I always felt there was a sense of time evolving, unmanipulated--it just couldn't be controlled or organized or managed. We walked, sat in the garden, made something to eat, had a drink. To a little girl, I thought Tuff was the only grown-up in the world who remembered what it was like to be a kid and that made him magical to me. There will never be a therapist who compares.
So, now we have let him go and I am alright with that. After all, the best parts of Tuff are woven into the fabric of my being (and some of the not-so-great parts too). I share him with hundreds of others who each carry a piece or two but I can honestly say there will never be another man like Tuff. Even if it is hard for me to imagine a world without a man like Gramps wandering around in it, I will forever feel blessed to have known and loved (and to have been loved) by the man that was.
I do not do New Year's resolutions--no lists of what I will or won't do or objectives to take me along a tidy path to an ultimate goal. Instead, many years ago, I started declaring a "theme" for the year. I know that I am not the only person who does something like this and it has been a fun way for me to focus in on things that matter to me. Some years are really tough and it is all I can do to come up with something very simple (there was the year my only theme was to try to do a better job at keeping the refrigerator cleaned out), and other years I feel a bit more ambitious. When I turned 30, I made up my mind that I would spend the year writing 30 hand-written letters. The other night while I was talking to my sister, Tricia, on the phone she asked me if I had come up with a focus for 2009 and I was so tickled and flattered that she remembered my game. "Why yes!" I said, "I have..."
