"Il mundo e fatta per te." My grandfather said this to me a few weeks before his death. The world was made for you. He said it with a laugh that made it seem more like a curse. Anyway, it felt like one. I wondered why? What exactly did he see that would make him say that? I certainly wasn't heading up any alumni associations in honor of my success. No, it couldn't be a good thing; it was already too late for that. I knew this, but how did he know? Did he really know who he was speaking to despite the usual delusions that are foisted upon grandparents about their children's children. I always thought so, and I tried to be honest with him, even as my parents communicated with mimetic faces and whispers behind his back.
Was this really all he was trying to tell me? That even though I'd been out of his life and everyone else's by three thousand miles and half a dozen years, that he knew? That he always knew? And that it was OK with him - OK with him in the same way that the rhubarb came up every year and he chopped it down? OK in the same way that he shrugged his shoulders and said "What can I do? Ride it out I guess?" OK with this man, my mother's father, who fought in a war on the foreign soil of his ancestors, who worked through the depression with the civilian corps building tunnels and houses, who provided for a blind son and a wife who degenerated for nearly twenty years. This man who wore fascist shrapnel forever embedded in his stiff knee and who took thirty medications a day for everything that ailed him. Ride it out? Ride what out? What was it between him and the earth after all that could still be ridden?
"They say my arteries will close. Soon. Anytime. And my heart will not stand another operation."
"I'm sorry grandpap."
"It's OK."
That again....it didn't seem OK to me somehow.
"I've had a long time and I miss your grandmother - she didn't know who I was for all those years."
All I could do was look over at him remembering her. My grandmother died from complications of cancers and Parkinson's at least ten years ago and he's been waiting ever since. It was a strange conversation but I knew it would be. I understood that he was long ready to be with her, but it was difficult to reconcile right there on his backyard patio in the full hum of spring. He seemed very much alive just then buttoning his bright red sweater over his pregnant belly, while over his shoulder the yellow irises bloomed in their mulchy borders, and the robins waited on white tipped branches for the sweet perfume of the cherry tree that he planted when my mother was born. Everything was alive, very much so. The new green carpet of bluegrasses and fescues had straightened up and would be cut soon - something I used to do for him as a young man. The red grapes were vining hard also, always just in time to make their good neighbor fence before the contest of spring planting between him and Frank next door. Even the brightening stalks of the rhubarb, before the leaves became coarse and overwhelming, were evidence against this. But there was a deeper harmony in that setting too. And there would be no contest this year of who got what in first and out last and how many bushels obtained. Everything came and went. Life. Light. Wonder. Abundance. And death. And it was OK, just as much as it wasn't OK, because it just was.
That night I flew back to California. I knew then that I would never see him again. That was how I wanted it - in the living, and that was the reason I made the trip. Of course, I still made the trip again, two months later. So much for that.
"It's up to you - If you want to come," My father said, giving me the news.
He had that tone he gets, or that people get, I guess, when they talk about it, almost like they had to whisper and be reverential, be polite about it, to it, lest it strike them down next.
I didn't want to go and I told myself, back then, when I made that trip and then later, week after week, that I was on firm footing. I had made my peace.
"I don't know dad - I wasn't planning on it, you know."
"I know, but I wanted to call. No one expects anything. It's just your mother mainly. All she has now are you kids."
How could I cut myself out of that? I needed to be there, in family. Of course. So I went the next day. I passed the time on the airplane trying to compose something to remember him by but nothing came. I gave up and lay my head into the wall of the plane and watched the empty rudder on the wing. It gave the illusion of being a delicate mechanism, lifting and lowering on nothing apparently while under the silent forces of gravity at 600 miles per hour. When we were kids he used to give us rides on his good knee and I always looked down at the other one, the one that didn't bend from the shrapnel, lying stiff in it's pant leg, and it too under it's own silent forces, relegating the whole leg to a kind of crutch or prop. He rubbed it a lot. It was a familiar twitch of his, to keep the circulation going.
The next afternoon I helped carry my grandfather to his grave. He was wearing a suit, which he never did, or not that I could remember, except in pictures of weddings and holy communions and the war. I wondered what happened to his red sweater. The more I thought about it the more I became obsessed with the idea that he had probably died in it and that it was somewhere rolled up in a bag, along with his hair clippings and toenails and soiled underpants and the blood they took out, or whatever, just whatever else was left.
Actually, this idea began before the funeral when my brother and I were going through his closet and drawers. I was looking for the red sweater then. I think we were encouraged by my father to pick something of his. I settled on some v-neck t-shirts of all things because he wore those too and they were already broken and cozy and felt like him. There was a drawer full of them. In fact, I would rotate them through my wardrobe for the next five years, and I still might have one or two, unwearabley worn thin somewhere at the bottom of a drawer, waiting for the day that I magically gain in the battle against my paunch, the same battle that he engaged in during the last half of his life.
After the funeral the family got together to eat and drink. Many of us carried this on elsewhere and into the early morning. Death was that one time you could get as drunk as you wanted and cry over the sentimental noise of crickets and no one would bring it up on you ever. By the time the family had split off, I was running with a friend of mine, Nagle, whose recently deceased pap knew my pap from the war regiment, and although they were never friends, it wasn't odd for people in a small town to pay their respects, even once removed. Besides which, Nagle had a joint on him. He said that when his pap died somebody came with a joint and got him high and he was figuring on repaying that kindness tonight. Later I found myself smoking it on a wooded hilltop overlooking town under a giant American flag that beat over our heads like a dark sail.
We were at a veterans memorial park, completely deserted at this hour, and hidden away from even the moon. It was a place where kids went to get high and finger each other. Kids like this one even, I said to myself, figuring that she's been here. I nudged Nagle because it was his fault. He brought her. He told her about the pot.
