So I’ve been watching a lot of tv. No, not really. Well, okay, maybe I have.
But in between episodes of Big Love, a lot has happened. When last I posted about Grubious the carpet mushroom and his illicit paramour, Myrtle, the carpet shrubbery, we were crossing our fingers and rubbing Buddha’s pendulous tummy that we would get a fabulous new sub-let. We did, and the new place is just as wonderful as we hoped.
It has one of them fancy remote controlled garages! And a yard for Beulah’s tinkling pleasure! My office looks out onto the Marin headlands (not directly, but hey look, there they are!) and is one block from the park so I can heckle the bison whenever I want, and we have whole separate areas for eating and working and playing and sleeping. The floors, they are wooden. The plants are only of the potted variety.
However, our landlord refused to give us back our deposit, saying that we didn’t give the full 60-days notice before moving. Simons and I maintain that 30-days was ample in light of the house being INFESTED with mold and creepy rug forests. Fortunately for us, our lawyer agrees. That’s right, we have joined the ranks of litigious Americans and are suing the pants off those who have wronged us/hurt our feelings/given us the typhus. Normally, I am opposed to capital punishment, but after coughing for five months and being forced to take steroids that made me eat 24/7 and developing chronic asthma and getting chest x-rays and weeping at the doctor’s office convinced I had lung cancer, I feel strongly that they deserve The Chair. I might settle for public flogging and a modicum of torture, but I reserve the right to change my mind and give them the chair anyway.
I must say though, I’m not really cut out for this kind of confrontation. Since we made the decision to seek legal counsel, I have these recurring nightmares that someone hits me with a bike or chops off my leg or what have you, and we have to sue. It’s this whole nightmarish world of conflict, and I wake up exhausted and cringing apologetically.
But moving and suing were not the greatest changes.
I had to go home at the end of March. My granddaddy died. My mom’s father passed away before I was born, so I only knew about him in stories and old black and white photos. But Daddy’s father I knew in Technicolor.
When I was little (and I was always so much younger than everyone else), Granddaddy always seemed so tall to me. He’d stoop down to show me a bright red tomato, fragrant with dirt and vine and salt air, and have me help mend the chicken wire fence around his garden so the marsh rabbits wouldn’t steal his vegetables. We’d gather fresh mint from the back steps to make sun tea on the porch; it was always cool under the stairs, with glossy dollar weed and sand and no stickers for small, bare feet. Granddaddy would take us crabbing off his dock, pulling up big pots of furious, clicking blue crabs; “grab him here, behind his back legs, Miss Tippy Toes, and he can’t pinch you with his claws.” He called me Tippytoes for the longest time, because I always walked around on my toes, I think the better to sneak up on and scare my sister. Then he’d crank away at his hearing aid so he could hear whatever “Why” question I had for him that particular second.
In the early mornings, Granddaddy would go for his dawn run, from his house three miles down to the front beach on Holden. There he would hunt for shells, conchs and sanddollars, olive shells and angels wings. The side porch was loaded with piles of bleached white shells, but the ocean kept washing them up on the beach, and he kept bringing them back. Every year at Christmas, he and Granny would decorate their tree with little sanddollar ornaments, painted with the names of all the children and grands. The boiled red shells of blue crabs, painted with gloss, glowed festively from the larger branches. Their colored lights played electronic Christmas carols and flashed in time with the music, but I don’t think anyone liked that much besides me.
Their house was a treasure trove of fascinating junk, because Granny and Granddaddy never threw anything away. I could rootle through my dad’s old schoolbooks, old photo albums of the family homes, Granny’s costume jewelry–always redolent of tea rose and cigarette smoke–and my uncles’ old playboy magazines, which is how I first figured out how bosoms were supposed to look (Sadly, those never panned out.). Then my sister, Melissa, would bust me and drag me outside to play pirate, where she would make me eat vile potions and leave me tied to the purple martin post while she went inside for snacks. She was a very cruel pirate. Sometimes being prisoner meant being tickled half to death and forcefed milk bones–those actually weren’t half bad.
At Granddaddy’s funeral, Melissa and I remembered the big sacks of penny candy he would buy for us. He’d hide one behind his back in his big, basketball player hands and make us guess, “Which hand?” We always guessed wrong, “Nope, not that one. Guess again.” I still despise myself for the day when I was too cool to play the candy game anymore.
Everyone in the family had such fond memories of Granddaddy, or Uncle Robert, as most of them knew him. There must have been a hundred cousins (almost all named Polly), and I forget how much I like them all. Not that I didn’t always, but I just don’t see them very often. I was terrified that it would be this very grim and sad occasion, where I would scuttle into corners, trying not to make eye contact, stuttering over people’s names (this is what I do at networking events), but it wasn’t like that at all. These were all familiar faces with wonderful stories about Granddaddy’s courtly manners and his ability to eat more than anyone else in the universe, and how he never let anything go to waste. The man once ate 13 burned hamburgers because Daddy said he was going to feed them to the dog.
My favorite story is of how he met my granny, Ethel Claire. She had already been married and had two little boys, my dad and my uncle Mike. One Valentine’s Day, her cousin came to her to ask her to go on a doubledate to a dance on some fancy lake. Apparently, Granny was an excellent dancer, and I’ve seen photos of her in her prime…what a knockout! She fixed her cousin with a steely eye and said, “No way. The last time I double dated with you, I ended up defending my virtue in the backseat of a car with my high heeled shoe.” The cousin eventually talked her round to at least inviting these two soldiers over for a beer and if she didn’t like the look of her date, she could just claim not have found a babysitter. After an hour or so of conversation, it was time to head over to the dance, and Granny smirked and said, “Now just a minute, Robert, while I go call the babysitter.” And that was that.
I’m sad now that I didn’t ask him more questions about the War or what it was like growing up in the Depression. We always rolled our eyes at his crazy magpie habits, but that whole generation knew something about knuckling down and getting by with what they had. And these days, we can all use a little more of that. I’ll miss his elegant penmanship–no one wrote as beautifully as he. I’ll miss the way he said, “Saaar-ah” and greeted new people with a “a what do you do?” I’ll miss his long, skinny frame and his spectacles and his horrible hearing aid–the damned thing never worked. But I’m pretty sure he could hear Granny waiting on him when he got to Heaven, ready to tell him, “Robert, you’re late,” and make him a plate of something.
Do they have tomatoes in Heaven?
