Grandpa

Tomorrow is the one hundred and thirty first anniversary of the birth of my maternal grandfather.  He died when I was seventeen years old and the many memories of him have suffered the inevitable beginnings of corruption that nearly forty six years and the habitual pausing too briefly and infrequently to reflect on but a few conspicuous events in his life, can exact.  In reverse chronology, there is the memory of visiting the dying physicality that once housed his great mind and soul, in a hospital room for the last time. Only a shrunken being at that point, his was a skeleton advancing to the fore underneath the "fabric" that covered his gauntness.  There were the staccato twitches of the head and extremities that made clear that here was not so much a man but a faltering machine, its energies ebbing away irrevocably and soon. Yet, this pink and gray supine form before me was Grandpa. Slightly less recently than that sorrowful visit, there was the senescent man of most of the months of his final three years who challenged, confounded and irritated, but was still recognizable as that loving guy who had hugged me unreservedly and was ever joyful whenever I entered the room, whether happily rushing into his arms as a grade school sprout or crawling as a pre-toddler toward his beaming visage.  Then too, there was the "real" Grandpa, the old man who was actually, by dint of his forceful character and amazing obstinacy conjoined with a keen intelligence, still a vibrant middle-aged person from about the time he turned sixty, just about contemporaneous with the start of America's involvement in the second world war, until about the time of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  In those approximately twenty years, he dominated his world, just as he had during most of his first three score on this planet. Autocratic, fiery tempered and always supercharged with artistic sensitivity that made stasis and mildness strange universes that he could not or would not inhabit for any meaningful length of time except through the mysterious bliss of the yin and yang that he shared with Grandma and whose true near saintliness could ensure it.  High drama was his lifeblood and insults or praise were common entities given and received in his tumultuous dealings with others, whether door to door salesmen, his landladies (each a twin sister who he deemed a strega in his unswerving judgment) or certainly any religious or pious being of any stripe, even secular "know-it-alls".

It occurs to me now that I am remembering more about Grandpa than I at first gave myself credit for. What causes uneasiness though, is the continuing near certainty that so many memories of him have been lost.  Rather than letting this fear overwhelm me, even though forgetfulness like the kind that came eventually to him and may some day be a permanent visitor in my world, it's no doubt best to scribble down any and all stories, however fragmentary, of this doting grandparent, perhaps biologically programmed like most, to shower me with love, and who made my existence almost daily, a nurturing, secure, ever hopeful and anticipatory one about life's treasures.  The always gentle chiding, the mocking depiction of my fledgling personhood as that of a slovenly brigand, the wholly fictional threat to incinerate my private parts with his ever present unfiltered, lit cigarette (one probably "had to be there" to utterly, anachronistically, and therefore impossibly, disabuse 21st century social workers of their phobias about such fantasies) and the eagerness to carry me aloft, usually on his shoulders, made the statement "I love Grandpa!" about as unconsciously a declarative statement of fact, as shouting to a playmate on a summer's day, "I love ice cream!"

He was, of course, much more than my grandfather and that of my brother and five cousins. He had been a self-taught musician, a fine carpenter, violin maker, poet, barber, newspaper columnist, actor and jack of many trades in the theatre in his native Sicily.  He was a rabid democrat (small "d") with anti-royalist leanings and some decidedly anarchic sympathies that led to his incarceration before he was, ironically, released upon the general pardon proclaimed when the Princess Elena of Montenegro, wife of King Victor Emmanuel III gave birth to their first child, Princess Yolanda of Savoy on 1 June 1901, the nineteenth birthday, curiously of Grandpa. He journeyed to America before the great earthquake that struck his hometown of Messina in 1908, leaving behind my grandmother whom he had married in 1902 and his first born, a daughter named Santa who he never met. She died in infancy before Grandma and the little one could join him here. He penned a poem about that great loss. They had eight children in all; five survived to adulthood. My mother was the seventh child and her only sister, Grandpa's sixth child, died in her twenties only a few months after her wedding day.  The grief on this occasion was likely even more profound than that which rended their hearts soon after the dawn of their marriage.

But to me, he was Grandpa.  He conspired to prolong my belief in the notion that the world was my oyster, solely mine, and he enriched me immeasurably making certain that love and confidence would grow, with me both unharmed and armed to face the all too soon arriving world of adulthood and cold reality.