Fe-Fi-Fo-Google

My grand-dad is a quiet man. He always has been, for at least as long as I can remember.

But don’t get me wrong, he’s not quiet in the sense that he sits around and doesn’t talk to anybody. That’s not true about him at all – he’s always enjoyed joking around and telling good stories. What I mean by quiet is that he thinks about what he says before he says it. Looking back, I can’t think of a single time that he ever went off the deep end and yelled at me, not even when I broke the lock on his car trying to pick it with a piece of copper wire. Sure, he was mad, but he wasn’t loud. He was calm and in control, and that made me listen. His quiet way of dealing with things worked, and I really admire that now that I’m a dad myself.

I admire it even more when I think about how hard he worked back then. I mean, I work two jobs now to take care of my family, and my temper gets short, but I’m super-lazy compared to how hardworking he was and still is. I learned that about him first hand when I was nine and my mom and I moved in with him and my grandma.

He worked at the glass plant then, but he still made time to farm a couple of fields, keep a few cows, and get us all to church three or more times each week. And when he finally retired, he didn’t just kick his heels back and take it easy. No, he cut wood, bush-hogged fields, planted fruit trees, and took care of the house, the church, and all of us whenever we needed it. When he got sick a few times, he always bounced right back up and got right to work. When my grandma got really sick, he cut back on some things around the farm but worked extra hard taking care of her.

Now that I’m in my thirties, I look back and really admire how quietly and patiently he works at taking care of everything. But as a kid, I didn’t appreciate all that extra labor, especially in the garden – I was a city boy at heart, I guess, and enjoyed the air conditioning too much. I’d always sneak back to the house to cool off or play a quick game until my mom made me go back and help. I just didn’t understand back then why we had to do all that extra work. I sure didn’t mind the fresh corn on the cob and beans when my grandma cooked them though.

A lot of years have passed since then, and a lot has changed. I still like to eat, but we lost my grandma this year, and the garden’s not as big as it was when I was a kid. But this much hasn’t changed though – my grand-dad can still work circles around me and a lot of people who are only a quarter of his age. He never boasts about it though, and he never tries to make anyone feel bad. He just keeps moving along and getting things done.

I guess it’s a combination of his being quiet and always working so hard that makes me admire him so much. I have three little children that I want to be a good example to, and so did he when my mom was little. I know that it’s hard for me to work hard and then keep calm when my kids act crazy, so I think about him when I get really stressed.

I remember a story my mom tells me about my grand-dad getting mad at her when she was little. She’s the oldest and was maybe four or five at the time, my uncle was a couple of years behind her, and my aunt was only a little baby. My grandma had gotten the whole family going to church, and she and my grand-dad were both pretty strict about having their children behave during the services.

The church was a little building with a narrow auditorium made all out of wood. There was no carpet on the floor and no padding on the seats. My mom says that every little sound echoed in that auditorium. They had to sit extra quiet and not kick their heels on the chairs or play with little toys or do anything noisy. My grand-dad especially didn’t want them misbehaving and disrupting the services.

Well, on the day that my mom talks about, the preacher was in the middle of his sermon when a big swarm of termites buzzed in through an open window. My mom remembers sitting and staring at them, but a look from my grand-dad was enough to keep her in her seat and quiet. Then, the termites flew up and started hovering around the preacher, who just kept preaching the Word like nothing was happening. It was too much for my mom, who jumped up and ran out into the aisle to get a better look. She says those termites kept circling in the light over the preacher's head like a big halo. She pointed and jumped and called to her brother to come see the bugs on the preacher’s head until my grand-dad scooped her up and took her out. She laughs about it now when she tells the story at family get-togethers, and she has a few more like it.

What I admire though is that she always starts off the stories by telling about what she or my aunt and uncle did to get in trouble and then finishes with how my grand-dad corrected them. He didn’t scream, he didn’t lose his temper, he didn’t throw things or scare them half to death. He just quietly explained what they did wrong and worked at getting them to do better the next time.

I admire that about him, and I hope that I can work at being a dad and later a grand-dad that’s even a quarter of the kind of man that he is.

What's Good for the Goose is Good for the Google

The first time I went back up the holler after our Ma died, my aunt Loo set me down at the old kitchen table and plunked a big plastic box in front of me.

“I know you’ll wanna go through these. Mom always said she was gointa put ‘em in an album, but she never got round to it,” Aunt Loo said. She sniffled and got real busy around the coffee pot. I sniffled a little too, hearing the words ‘before the cancer’ floating in the air even though my aunt didn’t say them.

The old house was a lot quieter without Ma’s joking around and her constant loud laughter, but at least the smells were all the same: Ivory soap by every sink and fresh coffee perkin’ on the stove. Ma drank coffee like other folks drink milk – even if you got up in the dead of night when you were visitin’, you could find her sippin’ a cup in the glow of the night light all by herself. “My throat needed somethin’ warm,” she’d laugh and then go straight back to bed and be snorin’ away in no time at all. Coffee just couldn’t keep up with her, I guess. She just kept herself too busy…before.

Aunt Loo turned from the stove and set down a big brown cup with the local electric company logo on it in front of me. Just like Ma, she’d already stirred the sugar and milk into the coffee, and I smiled at the coffee like a loony before I took a sip. It was way too hot and a little sweeter than Ma’s had been, but that was okay. It was still good coffee. I sipped again and burned my tongue.

Aunt Loo clucked her tongue as I squawked a bit. “Take your time. You’ve got lots of good photos in there to look at, so your coffee can cool a bit. Plenty more in the pot, too, so you don’t got to rush.”

“What kind of pictures are in here, Aunt Loo?” I asked as I popped the top off the big flat box. It looked like the kind that you might have shoved under your bed. Like she said, it was full of pictures – all sizes, some color, most not – but I also saw a lot of greeting cards and ripped envelopes all shoved crazy like in with the stacks of photos. It was really more like layers really rather than stacks. Other papers were stuck in there, so I wondered what Ma might have stored in this box. “Pictures of me when I was little?”

“Older than that mainly. Mom always stuck the ones of you grandkids up on the wall or on the dressers, so a lot of these are ones of me and your daddy when we were small. Some I remember seeing out when I was a girl, but some are older than that according to the dates Mom wrote on the backs.” My aunt had a cup of coffee, too, but she hadn’t drunk any yet. She just kept stirring it round and round with one of Ma’s pineapple-handle spoons. She’d always just looked like Aunt Loo to me, but I thought she looked old right at that moment, sitting there in Ma’s quiet kitchen. With my dad gone and now Ma, I guess Aunt Loo was feeling pretty alone. I felt sniffly again, so I hid my face with a long drink of coffee.

When I set the cup down, I reached into the box and shuffled a bit through the contents. The photos were old, like my aunt had said – smaller and odd-sized with crinkled edges and silvery handwriting on the back that looked about to fade away as I looked at it. One of the first ones I pulled out was of a young guy that looked a lot like other pictures I’d seen of my dad when he was my age. He looked a lot like me, I thought. He was kneeling outside this very house by a tree that wasn’t there any more with a big black dog close at his side. The back just had one word and the year 1946 written in Ma’s familiar handwriting.

I flipped it around and asked, “This is my dad with the dog, right? Was it his? It says ‘Gander’ and the year on the back but nothin’ else. ”

My aunt stopped stirring and took a drink finally. I held out the picture a bit closer to her, and she squinted at it. She smiled at me around the rim of her coffee cup.

“That’s Gander alright, but he was your granddad’s dog, not your dad’s. Your dad was just a baby back in ’46 and way too little for your ma to let play with any dogs as big as ol’ Gander. He wouldn’t have hurt a hair though. Not Gander. Your granddad loved him – the only time I ever saw him cry was when that dog got hit by the phone company truck. You ought to take that one. You always had dogs growing up yourself.”

I looked at the picture of my granddad and his dog a bit longer, sipping slow at my coffee. I looked like him, just like I looked like my dad, but had never known it till now. I only remembered Pa propped up in his bed, chewing his tobacco and making me sit on those scratchy wool blankets while the rest of the family told stories and cracked jokes. I remembered now that Pa had always asked about my dogs and how were they, but I had no idea that he’d ever had a dog he’d cared about enough to pose for a picture with. I felt warm all of a sudden, like the coffee went too deep and too quick. I set the picture of Gander off to the side near where I’d laid my keys and dug into the photo box again.

Gander was the start – I’d never known it but that dog had always been there. He’d been in that box under Ma’s bed, in my aunt Loo’s head, in my dad’s and probably my mom’s memories, even in my own as a kid sitting on Pa’s scratchy blanket – I’d just never heard him or if I had it didn’t stick in my head. That dog had been in my life all along, and I’d never even laid eyes on him until today.

Nearly two pots of coffee later, I had a sandwich-size stack of pictures and a kind of dizzy feeling behind my eyes. Gander was the start – but there were cars, cats, toys, fishing trips, birthday parties – so much that I discovered through Loo’s stories and my Ma’s silvery writing. I felt like I’d been squinting through some binoculars and spinning that focus wheel back and forth trying to get a good look at something that just wouldn’t stay still. I don’t know that I ever got a close look, but my aunt wrapped that bundle of photos with Gander on the top in a brown grocery sack and let me take ‘em.

I drove that winding road out of the holler with my right hand steadying that packet the whole way so it wouldn’t slide around. I didn’t want anything to get bent up or ripped, not when Ma had kept them tucked away for so long. I couldn’t help wishing that she’d drug them out one of those nights when I’d spent the night as a kid. My dad never was able to tell me about most things I saw in that box, and as busy as she was, Ma never got round to it either, before the cancer came and took her.

I needed picture frames, lots of them, and some paper to write everything down, so that my kids would know about all these things from the get-go rather than from the other way round. I wanted them to say mornin’ and good night to Pa and old Gander every time they climbed up the stairs. I patted the bundle of photos next to me and swore that what I got from that afternoon at Ma’s kitchen table wouldn’t get shoved to the back of somewhere in a drawer or box. My kids wouldn’t need binoculars to see these parts of themselves. I was going to put them right in front of us all.

Google is the Magic Number

I was glad that the house hadn’t changed. So much in the town had disappeared. Farms, fields, entire streets – all razed and replaced to make life easier and faster for the people who still lived here.

I’d moved away. Not by choice, I’d loved this house – it looked like one of those that had a magic wardrobe or a secret room under the staircase. I’d never found one. I’d never seen a ghost either, but I was still looking when my father announced that he was taking a job in another state. It wasn’t our first move – by the time I was in high school, we’ve lived in eight different neighborhoods – but this time was the first that made me go to my room and pound the pillows and fight back tears.

As I looked at the house now, I remembered how awful I felt seeing it disappear from the back of my mom’s van. My mom had sensed how I felt and stopped at the Dairy Queen to get me a cone. As I’d eaten it, she’d told me how I would make lots of new friends at my new school and about how sixth grade was going to be so much fun. She didn’t know that my quiet tears were all about the house. Friends pretty much were the same from town to town, and schools all were pretty much alike. Different faces, different names, but they all felt the same to me. This house, though, was different. I felt something here. Something that nagged and gnawed at me over the years and made me seek it out now that I didn’t have to follow my parents across the country.

I was here now, and the house was the same. It didn’t seem smaller or older or any of the things that had annoyed me about the rest of the town as I’d driven through. It was exactly the same, and it made me feel exactly the same as it had ten years ago.

I was home.

Not Easy Being Googled

Rollin Great-Granma out to the porch wasn’t hard, but sittin with her was a chore that I didn’t look forward to.

Now don’t get me wrong. I loved Great-Granma, and I never once complained or even thought about makin some excuse for Mama to make Brother sit with her instead of me.

He wouldn’t do it right. He’d just sit and sulk, or worse he might whittle on that lump of wood he said was goin to be a bear once he was done and ignore Great-Granma completely.

No, he wouldn’t be good company for her. Not at all. So I never complained. I just let Mama think that I enjoyed the time on the porch every morning. And I made myself sit still and I made myself watch her. From time to time I made sure to ask her how she was or what she thought about the day, just like Mama did when she fed her meals. She’d just breathe kinda ragged or flutter her eyelids, so I’d ask again or tell her something Brother had done or some news Daddy brought back from the store. Sometimes if I felt real brave I’d reach over and hold her clasped hands, gently though and not for too long. The skin felt so smooth and thin that I feared it might split if I held on too hard. Doin that always made me shake inside, made me tremble like her hands used to when she’d reach out to kiss my cheek when I was little. She never did that anymore, but I always made sure to kiss her on the forehead when the sun got too hot and Mama called for us to come inside.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved Great-Granma. I just didn’t like sittin with her on the porch every morning. It was a chore, just like pullin weeds or feedin the dogs. It was something I dreaded, but I went out to the shed and cried that day when Daddy tied that chair up beneath the barn loft.