About My Grandfather's Death

When I was in high-school my grandfather used to come visit from California and stay at our house, sleeping on our couch for weeks at a time. He was old, he talked funny, and he had a lot of peculiar habits. I know he ate real food because he loved bad family run tex-mex restaurants, but all that anyone can remember him ever eating was peanut butter and drinking cokes. He would come to my house or one of my cousin's houses and occupy the porch for days, smoking and drinking cokes and eating peanut-butter, which we all assumed he used to hold his dentures in, because we would often find those dentures sitting on the kitchen table in the morning next to an empty jar of Jiff and a coke can full of cigarette butts. This was all to our teenage despair, because, odd hygene issues aside, if we weren't quick when passing him he would shout at us, "come here boy," and that would be it. I couldn't make the phone call I wanted to, I couldn't hatch the escape plans I need to (by that time my parents had installed dead-bolts that locked from the inside of the house to prevent night-time escapades) because I had to join him immediately on the porch or suffer some kind of multi-generational guilt harassment. And there, shrouded in smoke from Winston Fulls, or Camel wide gauges my grandfather would weave yarns that could go on for hours, deconstruct the world with an honest wit that I was unable to appreciate because I was too absorbed in being 17 to know how to appreciate it.

Pfffft. He would suck on the cigarette for a long time and then forget that it was in-between his fingers.

I didn't realize it at the time, but what he was doing was an effort at the end of his life to patch up the relationship with his family that he abandoned on multiple occasions.

I didn't realize that he had actually been a pretty interesting person. Owner of several bars, one of which may or may not have been a strip-club, depending on how much my mom has had to drink when she tells the story. As far as I know he never had one job or one career, but jumped around, following what was interesting, quitting what wasn't, starting businesses and pawning them off on his children when he lost interest, and somehow making it work for a good run of 70 years. He wrote a book. He successfully kicked the bottle. And he brought 8 human beings into the world.