I Guess, I Just Want to Talk About Grandpa
He's been on my mind and in my dreams of late, and I kinda want the world to know about him, even though he never won a nobel prize, ya know? I've abandoned most social media, and I think tumblr is the place that can appreciate it best.
He was amazing. My mom hurried us up in the mornings some summer vacation days, just so we could drive off and visit grandpa, and have time to chat, and cut up watermelon.
I never appreciated the man fully when he was alive. He was big and burly, gray of hair and beard, always had a cigarette in hand, but always smiling when we were there.
He was stationed in Okinawa in WW2, and had a girl he liked a lot. Or, at least, several pictures of him and her were taken together. But he flew back home and fell in love with a gal from NJ. A whole street is named after his parents back there, because they were the first to build a house there. Hearing my mom tell about it now, I kinda feel why she loved the "Little House on the Prarie/Little House in the Big Woods" series she used to read to us before bed. It must have reasonated to her, having been brought up by kids who were brought up in the Great Depression.
He always smelled like cigarettes and sunshine and ink. He had a couple of thick tattoos on his arms that were so worn, you couldn't make sense of them without context. I was too young to ask for context, but I've got similar tats, now that I realize. But they're so simple, nothing will be lost with age; no worries. (I'll be able to tell my niblings about the epic that is "Supernatural!")
He was the first man I knew to own a PS1, and we'd be so happy to play the demo disc he got with it, for MONTHS. Although, to be fair, he had a Nintendo with the OG Duck Hunt/Mario Bros cartridge, and we spent hours over that, as well. I remember the Dr. Mario game the most.
He'd used to stand on the porch, where the Touch-Me-Nots grew thick, and tell us where the vegetable garden needed water, and we were only too happy to oblige. I don't think we had a hose in our apartments, back then, so it was a novelty.
When I was 12?-13? He lent me a book that caught my attention. It was about an intersex teenaged orphan, running away from the nunnery, and finding greatness, and finding love from several people(?) (I think one was a beheaded gal ghost, another was an incubus, can't remember the following lover-) along the way. Interesting way to learn that I was allowed to live my feelings, but okay.
I don't know why grandpa's been in my mind lately. I've dreamt about him several times in the past year, and I can't put my finger on it. Maybe it's a "Keep going, even if you think you can't" vibe. Or maybe it's just me dreaming if simpler days. Where the poppies grew, where you could play in the sandbox, where it was beautiful.
