My Grandpa

In the early '80s, my paternal grandfather was suffering with lung cancer. He had been a smoker, dropping the habit when he had a massive heart attack some 10 years earlier. Whether related to his smoking or unrelated, the Big C eventually hit him in the lungs with both fists. The doctors deemed it as inoperable and began zapping him with radiation, hoping that the tumors might shrink. They didn't, at least in any helpful way.

One of the last times I remember being with my grandpa was when I drove him to Humble for a radiation treatment. We got in the car and he locked his door, but then my grandma and her sister from California came over to the door and tried to tell him something. We could hear them saying, "Unlock the door! Unlock the door!" My grandpa heard them, but pretended not to understand. "What? What?", he said. I thought that was the funniest thing.

The radiation and the cancer had already weakened him. He moved around slowly, lacking the energy of earlier days. His former body had become a frail spirit, wrapped in skin and bones. He had been a voracious gardener since his retirement and was always working on something. Grass didn't grow under Grandpa's feet, nor in his garden.

He grew sugar cane. We would cut down a stalk, peel off the hard, bamboo-like outside, and chew the pithy insides to get the sweet juice, later spitting out the pith when it was void of goodness.

He grew peanuts. Late in the evening, he would pull up a couple of vines, hose all the dirt off of them, harvest the peanuts and roast them in the oven. He would then sit in his easy chair, listening to baseball on the AM radio and eating his freshly roasted peanuts.

He planted some kind of hybrid blackberry vine in his garden, which grew the fattest blackberries I have ever seen--some as big as strawberries. Grandma would make a blackberry cobbler from them, and if you dumped a dollop of vanilla ice cream on top of a hot helping, you would see visions of heaven and a choir of angels.

He would take my brother and I squirrel hunting. On one occasion, he pointed to a squirrel in a big oak tree, but we couldn't see it. He tried again to point it out. "Follow that limb, then go left, then look just above that small clump of leaves." Still, the squirrel remained camouflaged, ensconced in his lofty palace. "Here: I'll just fire a shot and scare him out." 

BOOM!

Plop!

"Oops!"

I was a college student in 1983, just 20 years old. I remember receiving the call in my dorm room. My brother and I, plus my male cousins, were the pallbearers.

Neither my wife nor my children ever knew Grandpa. It will be their loss, for he was the finest of men.