Memories

Tuesday 25 March 1986

The house is ours!¹ That’s a nice house I tell ya!

_______________________
1. I remember him with the rumpled look of the time which has been captured in some photos. The thick beard. The lumberjack clothes. He comes in the door and says its ours and my sister and I rush to hug him. We were excited about moving for all the usual reasons. The calendar tells me it was a Tuesday; we’d come home from school, and he’d been out negotiating. Worked out the deal, got the papers signed or whatever. Twenty years later he makes a show of the slowness of the corn syrup, saying it’s like molasses in January, although we have central heating now and he never eats molasses anyway. Time has shaved off the beard and etched gray into the air, and taken away a healthy plumpness which never turned obese and which I think I’ve inherited. He fills the coffee mug with the ice cream, a chore since the block is frozen hard. Then the patience of the thick corn syrup, which he’s always enjoyed with ice-cream.

Wednesday 05 March 1986

Well I tell you every test I’m getting this week is nearly all F’s.^1. Bad you Tim, bad boy.

_______________
1. I remember this was because of the commotion surrounding my grandfather’s death, when homework and studying was the least of my concerns.

Monday 03 March 1986

Really tired. All last week was up late – so no wonder. Had pretty much homework – I thought.

Sunday 02 March 1986

It was another good day. Was really tired today. Got lots of exercise.

Saturday 01 March 1986

Good day. Had lobster for super. Airwolf was good. Cob’s¹ was good to.

________________
1. I was quite a fan of Airwolf. Twenty years later, I find myself watching Battlestar Galactica on Saturday nights. I remember Cob’s to have been a television show, but I’ve been unable to find anything on it through Google, which probably means that I spelled the show’s name wrong, or that it wasn’t actually called Cob’s.

Friday 28 February 1986

Good day. Not very much homework. I played UNO with Michelle.

Wednesday 26 February 1986

Left school early. I cried at the funeral. Went in a limo! Went to bed at 12:00.¹

___________________

1. I was up late because of the wake, in which many people got drunk. My specific memory is being under the dinning room table and laughing hard at the stories being told by my grandfather’s old friend and one time neighbor, Dr. Felix, who’d also served as the family doctor to my aunts and uncles. I remember finding one story particularyly funny, and that one being the tale of my uncle’s hunting injury, when he’d been shot in the leg as a young man.

This was the first and last time I’d been in a limosine, driven to the funeral from the funeral home with my parents. The funeral itself was a strange affair – the church was packed (as my grandfather had been prominent) and there’d been more than one priest presiding, one of whom was a large man with a loud voice, and more than one person said, ‘he didn’t need a microphone’. When my other grandfather died in 1993, that funeral was a even stranger affair, as we all sat in a room off to the side of the usual … the pews reserved for people who weren’t members of the family, sequestered as we were. I’d have to turn my head to see the orations, look through the partitions in the wall. However, at this point, 7 years earlier, I sat in the pews next to my relatives in the Catholic church, and at the end, when they were wheeling the casket out and down the aisle, I let myself cry as the full weight of ‘I’ll never see him again’ hit me.

Tuesday 25 February 1986

Same as Feb 24. Went to home. It snowed all day. He looks so good in that coffin.¹

_________________
1. I can see that I wrote this after the fact, filling in the events of Monday and Tuesday in the past tense. Thus, ‘same as Feb 24′ – we went to Weymouth, we went to the funeral home, my father taught me that relatives might want to shake my hand and say ‘mes sympathie’. I forget if he taught me what, if any, my response should be. The day before, the discussion around the kitchen table, my uncle talking about how my Grandfather had a loathing for funerals three days after a death, and how this was nonetheless what was going to take place.

At the funeral home that evening, it was kind of boring, kind of strange. My dead grandfather in the open casket to my left as I sat there and watched all the old people come to pay their respects. All very solemn and weird in the way that life’s rituals are weird when you’re a kid and you don’t quite get it. Around this time there was a drive with my Mom, I sitting in the passenger seat ‘up front’ and she saying the usual, ‘you can be happy he’s in a better place’ and perhaps this was the time, because we were talking about death, that I told her that sometimes I’m so curious about Heaven I can’t wait to get there, which she found a little alarming, of course. Now I have no interest in any of it whatsoever.

A year ago, I had this diary out and my sister found it and read some of it, finding it funny. At dinner that night my mother read from it and this day’s entry in particular made her laugh: ‘he looks so good in that coffin’. What I remember is looking at the still face of my grandfather, the mystery of death, and lightly touching his face to experience it in some way. But then I felt weird, because death=germs and all that, and I had a spell as a germophobe at around this time, during the mid-80s, so afterward, at my grandmother’s, I couldn’t tell anyone that I’d touched my grandfather and felt gross, because it felt shameful, and I washed my hands more than once. What I do remember was the coolness, and that lingering feeling of uncleanliness, and how I should have a more respectful feeling for my dead grandpa than simply feeling he was now gross.

Sunday 23 February 1986

Good and bad. Pretty good at beginning and bad at end. Grandpa died today.¹

_________________

1. Some notes:

The Buddha was born in 2777 (according to my standardized chronology) and was 12 years old when Confucius was born in 2789. Confucius, it is said, ‘enjoyed putting ritual vases on the sacrifice table.’ (Wikipedia). This would have been in the 2790s. The Buddha left home to go on his journey of Enlightenment in 2806 at age 29, two years after Confucius began studying in 2804, as it is said, ‘At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning’. The Buddha attained Enlightenment in 2812 at age 35, and Confucius tells us that in the year 2819 he took his stand. The Buddha died in 2857 at 80 and two years later, Confucius writes, ‘At seventy, I follow all the desires of my heart without breaking any rule.’ Two years after that, in 2861 he died at age 72. Or perhaps he died at 71, before reaching his birthday that year.

Two-thousand four hundred and sixty five years later, in 5326, (otherwise known as 1986) my grandfather died at age 71, a man whose name is unknown to history, another blip in that great span of time between those ancients and ourselves. He is memory to me now, more legend than human to my cousins born after him, one of whom will be twenty this year. My grandfather was born to a lumberjack and housewife a few weeks into the events we now call World War I. At 31, (my present age) he saw my father for the first time, a baby born two weeks after Easter and two weeks before Hitler would shoot himself in a Berlin basement. Thirty years after that, I would be born, and now I’m at the age when I should be (according to this pattern) producing the fellow whose child will remember me twenty years after my death. If I were to die at my grandfather’s age, that would put this grandchild’s memory in the year 2066. But this pattern appears to be broken, since there’s no chance I’ll be having children anytime soon, and perhaps this also means I have more than 40 years left to live.

My father was in Moncton, my mother called him to tell him the news. I’d been playing with my Lego boat, my sister near me. She recieved the phone call and sat on the couch in the living room, and when she hung up told us that he’d passed away. My sister, crouching to my right, sprang up and ran to my mother and begain sobbing. I had a quiet and stunned reaction, yet joined the hug happening on the couch. The phone call to my father, away in some motel, and so to this day I don’t know how he reacted to the news his father had died. It’s also something I don’t feel it’s any of my business to find out.

It was a bit of surprise, since the week previous he’d been on the mend. The previous Thursday, when I went to the doctor’s regarding my pencil-wound, my mother and he had talked about how he’d been getting better, because the doctor was in fact my uncle. And yet fate intervened on this weekend in February, and a lifetime of smoking and drinking had worn out a body not destined to live to the Canadian life-expectancy of the time, which was 75. That’s what I remember thinking, as I’d recently learned about those statistics – that he’d died three years short of when ‘he was supposed to’, and yet that three year measure would only have been acurate had he made it to his next birthday that September. Had he made it to that birthday, he would have met his latest Grandchild born that August, a boy, a cousin to myself, the first son of my uncle, the third of my grandfather’s sons. At the news of my cousin’s birth I was happy since the responsibility of carrying on the family line no longer rested solely with me.