Grandpa

My grandpa after enlisting post WWII.

The last time I communicated with my grandfather, I was laying in a hospital bed in Kansas, and he was lying in a hospital bed in Illinois.  He was scheduled for surgery that day, and I was stuck in Kansas while a recent surgical wound was tended to by a nurse.  My sister was with him, so I sent a text:  "Please let grandpa know that I'm thinking of him today even though I can't be there.  I'm at the hospital, too!"  I attached a picture of me waving a big goofy wave at the camera.  Reports are that he chuckled a bit at the picture.  Later, just before surgery, I passed on word that I was praying for him.

He died the next morning.

---

Allegedly, the first time I met my grandfather, I was passed from one car to another through a window.   I don't remember this.  The first memory I do have of him is him playing the organ in the blueblack pre-dawn darkness at the family farm.  The organ sat on the front porch, a long, narrow space on the front of the house.  The porch was anchored on either side by twin beds where there was usually a grandchild or two trying to get some sleep.  While grandma conjured breakfast in the kitchen, grandpa conjured wakefulness with his organ--one lovely, rambling song played on repeat for twenty or thirty minutes.  After breakfast there would be garbage to burn and cattle to feed, cows to milk and hay to bale.  There would be apples to pick and pigs to tend to.  After the real work there would be forts to build far out in the pastures, ropes to swing on in the barn, and creek beds to explore.   No one slept in on the farm.   Grandpa's organ made sure of that.

---

Grandpa had, unbeknownst to me, been in the hospital for several weeks.  I knew he was in shortly after I returned from Christmas break.  I learned about his hospitalization just after I had been chauffeured back to Kansas by the collective efforts of five people and three cars--the lingering effects of a surgery prevented me from sitting in a driving position for any sustained period of time.  I remember feeling concern and dismay that, at the moment, under my own steam, I couldn't get back to Illinois to see him.  But a few days later I received a message that he was doing better and would be sent home.  In time this message would prove wrong, but I accepted it gratefully and went on with my life.  There would be other days.  When I got the call that he was in the hospital again, my concern intensified.  "He's -back- in?"  "No," my sister said, "he never left."  After a recent double dose of surgeries, I had been left with an unhealed wound that needed professional care and a digestive system that was having a painfully difficult time adjusting to life without a gallbladder. "I can't get in the car right now," I thought.  "Two weeks ago I had to have a team of people drive me back to Kansas.  I can't fold myself up into the car and sit like that for nine hours."  I would have to wait and plan.

---
I remember riding on the the tractor with grandpa.  It was big old red thing, the kind of tractor before air conditioning, CD changers, and GPS navigation.  Grandpa would climb up on it and I would follow up behind him, plopping myself down on his lap.  I couldn't have been more than six or seven.  On this particular day, we went right out of the barnyard driveway and down around the corner of the tar and gravel road.  There was a hay field there, and I think we were moving the bales into a cluster that could be covered in the coming fall.  He let me "drive" and together we quietly worked the bales, gathering them into a line.  He wasn't a talker, and I sat quietly while he did the complicated maneuvers around the bales and worked the levers to operate the forklift.  I was simultaneously thrilled and scared shitless.  I was happy to be "helping" grandpa, but grandpa's temper could shift.  I never really knew what to say to him, and besides, this was work, and work was important, dammit.  Shaped as he was by this important work, grandpa was a powerfully rough man.  By the time my conscious mind came along, his back was slightly stooped from years of lifting and pushing and planting and fixing.  Where it poked out from under his blue chambray work shirts, his skin was tanned to leather, rough and cracked to the point that only bag balm (udder cream for cows) would repair it.  (During the evenings, reclined in his roller chair, he would dip his hands into a mini-crock-pot-sized tub of it and massage it into the cracks while watching the Lawrence Welk Show and Keeping Up Appearances.)  As we worked in the field, the skies grew darker and the wind shifted, suddenly chilly and biting--there was a storm coming in.  There wasn't a thing around but grass and fence lines, and the darkening sky loomed over us, ready to deliver a gully washer.  Without talking, grandpa whipped the last bale into place and then punched the accelerator on the tractor, bumping and jolting us across the field to the gate that led to the road.  I don't remember what we did when we got back to the farmhouse, but I do remember speeding along the country road, tires humming on the surface that was worn to a flat strip of black by a combination of use and a hot summer sun.  As we went faster and faster, mud from the rear tires shot up and fell back down like little raindrops, pelting our arms.  It took me a minute to figure out what was happening as the brown dots smacked down to rest on my hands, but the speed and the paint-splatter mud somehow made me feel very important.  Real work, real danger, real storm.  We made before it hit.  I'm sure grandma had the weather radio on when we arrived.

---

It was a tense couple of days while a steady stream of messages went back and forth regarding his health and happiness.  Soon it was decided he needed a surgery--the non-invasive tricks weren't working.  On the day of the surgery, after my own hospital visit, I nervously went about my day.  At one point I found myself in the office next door asking a co-worker if I was a bad grandchild.  It didn't feel right that he--my last living grandparent--was there--and I was here.  After the news that the surgery had been successful--"he will even get to go home after a brief stint in a nursing home"--I was relieved.  I had been right not to jump into a car.  I would visit on President's Day weekend--the next three-day break on the schedule.  I would be completely healed and he would be well on his way.  I'd get -Keeping up Appearances- on DVD and we'd watch some episodes.  I'd get him up for a walk.  Maybe we'd play Monopoly.  There was still time.

---
I don't remember why or how it started, but one night my sister, grandma, grandpa and I played Monopoly.  I don't remember if anyone else was there, but I do remember that, after hours of game play, grandpa was Mr. Moneybags.  He owned most of the board, and it was becoming pretty clear to the rest of us that there wasn't much hope in establishing our own hotel empires.  We could barely get around the board without bankrupting ourselves on his territory.  My grandpa, who was in life a chronically cash-strapped family farmer working his 160 acres in the era or corporate farming, was a millionaire.  And, as it turns out, he was the kindest millionaire I'd ever met.  With the grin of a comic book lover who'd just discovered Superman, grandpa started doling out "loans" all around the board.  He couldn't stop himself from going on and on about the importance of generosity and about how "I mean it, I'm having a damn good time here, and I don't want it to end."  It was, perhaps, the one night that everyone in the house stayed up past ten.  He brought it up every time I saw him for years.  Every time it was "I mean it, I had a damn nice time."  I did too.

---

When I got the call yesterday morning, I knew what the news was before I answered the phone.  I could hear my sister breathing in a big gasp or air before she started talking.  I didn't have much to say except for "that bastard was supposed to wait."  Just the night before, my sister and I had talked about how he had "made up his mind to live," how he wanted to "go home, drink tea, and pet my dogs."  "Yeah, he's not going anywhere," I had said with a chuckle.  The bastard skipped out on us, on me.  I just needed two weeks to get my angry gut straightened out, to get my semester of teaching fully under control, to let my surgical wound go forever away.  Two weeks for a big enough break in my schedule to make the nine-hour drive seem justified.

Even now, as I tap the words onto my laptop, I flush with anger and tears. 

Two weeks.

---

Every time I saw my grandpa, he'd look me up and down and give me a grin.  "Spark Malone," he'd say.  "The people's choice.  Squeaky hair and a yellow voice."  When I was very young, it made me squeal with delight and he'd scoop me up and lean me across his lap, tickling the shit out of my stomach until I couldn't breathe.  It was with the pure, unadulterated joy of a proud grandparent that he attacked each of his grandchildren in this way.  I saw him do it to the younger kids after me, even to the teenager who came into the family through marriage.  He had to make up for lost time with her. 

There wasn't a single thing I knew about the man that wasn't pure, simplified down to its most basic level.  During a visit, my mom and I brought ice cream for dessert.  At home, my family was dedicated to the Schwan man.  I had the option of ice cream every day.  I got my bowl without thinking much about it, but grandpa, he took his bowl to the couch, slouched way down with his legs crossed straight out in front.  He balanced his bowl on his belly and gazed at it with an intensity I can't describe.  His spoon played with the ice cream, dipped in and then back out, rolling the scoops around.  He would carve out a bite, put it in his mouth, and then hold it there, lips puckered as the ice cream slowly melted over his taste buds.  It was as if ice cream was still a miracle treat, like we had been transported back to the land of soda counters and ice boxes with actual cubes of ice.  He was a kid having a treat.  I'll never forget watching him eat those scoops of ice cream, his eyes locked on the bowl.

He was a man who thought about things.  He didn't always come up with the right answer or the right thing to say, but whatever he had to say was principled, direct.  His life was a simple one.  If you go out and treat the soil right, it'll provide a living for you and your family.  If you treat people right and teach them to treat the world right, then you'll make good people to have around.  I can't tell you how many times I heard him repeat the line "Carolyn and I never were money rich, but if you count family, we're the richest people I know.  We're damn blessed to have good people like you around."

---

It would be awfully convenient to blame my anger on his sudden death.  The truth is that I hadn't been a very communicative grandson.  After the death of my mother and then the death of my grandmother, I sort of kept things at a distance.  I was working on being honest and true to myself, and I didn't know how to communicate with people from my past, even close family members.  I cultivated a life on my own terms and new friendships with people who knew only the new me.  They didn't come with any entanglements. 

But, as long as he was alive, there was always the idea of a home out there.  The home where grandpa's desk was always covered in something farming related--a Burrus seed catalog, a calendar of John Deere tractors, a list of nearby farmers.  Where there was always a bed, ancient and springy though it may be.   Where grandpa fiddled on an organ and shelled walnuts until his fingers turned black.

There's something about that death that draws a final line, that solidifies who you were, often in sharp contrast to who you want to be.  In so many other circumstances--weddings, anniversary parties, Easter gatherings--there is optimism, a sense that everyone will be seen by everyone in the future, that there is still time, that there will still be time.  With death, however, the proverbial chips have fallen where they may before you even know there was a game. 

Regardless, there's one less home for me in the world now and I really need to believe that, as my dad said, there's one more angel looking down.

Stories Live Here

Aren't we the cutest kids ever?

Stories live here.

It's the last day of my trip home to my dad's house.  When I moved into my first apartment in college, I ransacked my bedroom furniture and, consequently, no longer really have a room of my own here.  None of us kids do.  Our rooms are now shells where things accumulate.  I'm currently spread out in my cocoon, a king-size bed at one end of my dad's basement that was shifted here after he had the house redecorated and purchased a new bedroom suite.  Technically this used to be my brother's room.  My room has an air mattress purchased to make sure we all have enough sleeping space at Christmas, the one time we are all home together.  The air mattress, like this bed, is an accumulation, something that has crept in after we crept out.

This is the part of the house that doesn't get used much anymore.  My dad lives, always has, almost exclusively on the first floor.  The 1960s style wood paneled basement was the domain of my mother (laundry and craft room), me (family room=play room with blocks, Legos, and K-Nex sets strewn everywhere), and whichever kid was old enough and, in theory, responsible enough to earn a basement bedroom space.  I was the only kid who didn't break curfew and climb out the basement windows after bed-time, so I was technically the only kid who was ever responsible enough to be down here, but that's a different story.

There are so many stories enclosed by these walls.  Since my mother's passing, I have joined my brother and sister in moving on to other lives away from here.  As a result, the basement has become a catch-all for lives that used to be.  There's my giant wardrobe, the only piece of bedroom furniture that I didn't abscond with on my way to grad school.  There's the bookshelf with a set of encyclopedias long since outdated.  There's my violin and Poseidon's trident from my freshman year Greek mythology project, a no-longer-but-may-be-soon-needed-by-someone microwave, a waist-high wooden case for old VHS tapes, an antique lamp whose glass shade bit the dust and hasn't yet been repaired, boxes of family pictures sorted by my mother in ages past, my old desk with the disks for an early 2000s version of Paint Shop Pro, my first college computer, a costume from an Illinois College Follies performance, Banana Republic gift boxes from last year's Christmas.  The list could go on; all of these are accumulations.

And these accumulations accumulate naturally, like dust.  The floor plan is the same.  The furniture, while not the same as when I was a child, is in the same basic arrangement.  The picture of my siblings and me is still hanging in the same spot.  The effect is comforting, a gradual accumulation of life gathering like layers of sediment.  If you sift through them, you might discover a stack of drawings and find yourself in 1999 watching a young Marc Malone sketching floor plans of ships while watching the Discovery Channel.  You might travel to Paris via a bag of waiting-to-be-scrap-booked memorabilia from my study abroad experience.  Your eye might fall on a pile of antique Crayola tins and see a parade of Christmases where my mom always got one as a gift.  These things are everywhere you look.  And each thing is a story.

---

Tonight, as my dad let the dogs out before bed, I sat at the dining room table and picked up a copy of his Alumni newspaper.  We started talking about a high-rise dorm that was recently demolished, and before I knew it I was hearing about college, about my mother who lived, only briefly, in that now-demolished dorm with a woman who was "not bad, but the polar opposite of your mother" (I remember my mother referring to her as a "wild child" while shaking her head, her eyes locked in disbelief on the empty space in front of her).  I heard about my mom's method of coping with this roommate:  "Every night she would come over from her dorm and hang out with [her brother and me] until bed-time, and on some nights she traveled home every night.  But I probably wouldn't have met her otherwise, so it was a good thing in the end."  Then I asked about my dad's experience living with my Uncle Bobby, my mom's brother:  "It was interesting; he was a minimalist.  He had six shirts in his closet hanging next to six pairs of pants.  He probably had six pairs of underwear, too.  When I went off to college, my dad harped at me for filling a trunk with things.  I had one of those compact vacuum sweepers--'Well what the hell do you need that for?!  Don't you have maids to clean your dorms for you?'  No, Dad, we certainly don't..."  The conversation eventually bled into my college experience and I thought about how I did have a maid in my freshman year dorm room and how a suitemate and I joined the Orange Crush, a student cheering organization.  I also remembered how I was one of the only ones who used our in-apartment kitchen, and I wasn't great at remembering the dishes.  "Fred didn't care, but Stephen and David did."  Then we talked about me moving home and cloistering myself in a small, private school, about whether that decision was the right decision and why it was or wasn't.  The whole conversation was a high-speed trip through thirty some odd years of family history, and there was something magic about it.  There will be a time when no one, and I mean no one, has access to that part of my family history.  It can only be passed through stories.

---

 Earlier today I asked my dad if he is excited for Christmas.  "No," was the simple answer.  "But why?  It's the best time of the year!"  He thought for a moment.  "Christmas is stressful for me.  The shopping, the menu planning, the trying to make it special and rarely succeeding."  I tried to insist that it always ends up special, but I don't think he believed me.

The truth is that stories live with family, and inside the ancestral home, like no place else, we don't have to go in search of the stories.  They live in the alumni newspaper accumulating on the dining room table.  They live in the quilts pieced and sewn by my mother.  They live in the Crayola tins and the Follies costume and the pictures lined up everywhere.

Stories live here, and that's what makes coming home the best place for a quick end-of-summer vacation.  It's the getting away from the current version of "real life" long enough to reconnect with all of the past lives.  And that's why I don't need, now or at Christmas, extravagant dinners or fancy wines to make it special.*  I just need some stuff--some accumulations--to stare at and some family to explain it to me.

*Dad, if you are reading this, the extravagant dinners and fancy wines are nice, too.  So, you know, don't feel like you have to skip them, you know, just on my account.

Metaphors and the End of Semester Panic

Ronald Wallace's words toward the end of my own undergraduate river--"For Marc--Good luck at Iowa State--keep writing sestinas!" 

Writing isn't always about pretty things.  Sometimes it is about the monsters, the little things that go bump in our subconscious and send us flying from task to thoughtless task, like a spider who finds all points of contact vanishing mid-spin.

This morning I woke up while it was still darkish outside and cursed my internal clock for not understanding that, for the next three months, we no longer need to wake up before the sun.  After I had turned over a few times, I decided to approach my day with some vigor.  I did dishes.  Then I had some breakfast.  Then I unpacked a bag of books and read some poems from a Ronald Wallace book and remembered fondly the day he signed it for me.  Then I retreated to my bedroom for an hour or two of morning reading.  I made it through one full paragraph before I remembered I needed to order checks.  So I did that.  Then I paid a bill.   Then I was on my computer checking stats on my summer class.  Then I checked that all the items are still present in my Amazon shopping cart--I won't commit to buying them for a few more hours, even though they are essentials, not frivolity.  Then I checked my untouched-for-months blog.  Then I read some blogs.  Then I realized that I was panicking.

This happens every Spring semester.  I don't know how to do the ending of school.  I don't know how to do the ending of most things, but school is that one thing that pops up on repeat, once a year.  Sure, there are summer classes and before that there was summer studying and before that there was summer working, but the actual end of the regular academic year has always thrown me for a loop.

This year the loop seems, at least in the current moment, to be jolting pretty roughly.  All week I've been in a bit of a stupor--no more classes, must grade, must grade, must assess outcomes, must administer final exams, must say goodbye to students, students, students filing past my desk.  Must go to lunch, must watch students pile possessions into cars and backs of trucks.  Must watch the campus empty, must hear the hallway shift to silence as the students retreat off into life.  Must see graduation pop up around me, must put on regalia and a happy face, must process and smile and nod and clap and recess and shake hands and congratulate.  Must wake up the next day with not one clue how to not see students every day, how to say goodbye to the stories that we teachers collect of these lives that pass through our lesson plans and our hearts because, as much as we construct course policies and put on the face of the enforcer, as much as we tell ourselves to keep a distance, to use the course outcomes as a barrier between our souls and theirs, flayed out bare in a paper or in a speech class or in a creative writing workshop session, we can't.  And then they leave and we know, I know, how delicate humans are at 19, 20, 21.  And all I see is the whole promise of humanity shining behind each cap and gown.  And I'm afraid that life won't be kind because life can be that way sometimes.  And I'm afraid I haven't taught them enough, that they haven't learned enough from the institution I do my little part to represent.

And then I think of all the times in class when Student A sat off to the left, and I could see his chemotherapy port poking out under his shirt, forcing memories of mom and of feeding tubes and of the holding of hands and the forever stopping of breath.  And I think of the times I saw Student B acknowledge the scars of the past and heal himself through the spinning of new words, forcing memories of the pills and the car and the friend behind the back tires, trapping me between the curb and his flesh, forcing me to stick it out until I could figure it out.  And then I thought of Student C poking that peculiar oddity with a pencil, walking around it, taking notes, encapsulating, creating, triumphing as she locks one more mystery of life behind words, forcing memories of learning to isolate, analyze, understand the past and then tap tap tap out a new future in writing.

And here I am today, isolating, analyzing, understanding, and tap tap tapping out what I've learned.

And here is what I've learned:  I worry because I doubt.  And behind it all, I'm afraid that when I plunge headfirst each year into the river and pull myself out when it reaches the sea, they won't remember the ripples I made.

And here is what I've learned:  I don't ever want to feel totally calm as the students wash out into the surf.