My grandfather was an alcoholic.
I didn’t know it as a kid. Not at all. Mom and Gramma did an amazing job of protecting my brother and me from that reality, and it never really occurred to me to question why he was stirring a drink with his pinky finger at 10am on a Saturday.
To be honest, I didn’t care.
Grampa was fascinating to me. He had this woodshop in his garage, thick with the smell of sawdust and sweat, and I loved that place more than any other. Most kids had fancy Play-skool building blocks in primary colors to make their castles, but not me. I had odd ends of 2x4s, long and irregular sticks of things, cast off finials from old chairs.
My building blocks were so much cooler than anyone else’s.
Trips to the hardware store still stick in my mind, the smell of galvanized metal mixed with lawn fertilizer, twisting my imagination around the colors in the paint chips, and never leaving the store without stickers or gum or some proof that I was utterly spoiled rotten.
I was so lucky that my grandparents lived right down the street from me. On warm spring and summer days, I could make the trip between our houses perched on the tailgate of Grampa’s truck or my dad’s station wagon, feeling a little dangerous, rebellious, and like the world’s rules didn’t apply to me. Even if we were only going 10 miles per hour.
There’s an old, ragged cassette tape somewhere – somewhere? – with Grampa and me sitting in his HAM radio room (the one with the drawer that mysteriously always had Smarties in it), messing with the telegraph thing or the radio dials or something.
He was making the tones bend and twist, and we were deciding which animals would make which noises, and how they would sound. He stumped me with a giraffe. I mean, what kind of a sound does a giraffe make, anyway? But we laughed a lot.
My Grampa fought in World War II. He didn’t talk about it much. My mom and Gramma have told me more in the years since he died, and as with many tales of war, his was ugly.
As part of his service in the war, my grandfather earned one of the Army’s highest honors, the Silver Star. The Silver Star is awarded for what they call “gallantry in action” while in military conflict.
Grampa earned his as a full staff sergeant (three bars) while in Germany. His platoon was pinned down, trapped somewhere, and they were without a communication link to another group of soliders hunkered down across a wide open field. They needed that communication link, as they had no working radio.
My grandfather crawled several hundred yards across an open field, pulling a telephone wire behind him to the other stand of soldiers. Then he crawled all the way back to his unit to complete the link, and establish that critical communication. He was under open machine gun fire the entire time.
The fortunate part is that he made it out of the war with his life, and undoubtedly saved dozens – perhaps hundreds – of others in the process. The unfortunate part is that the war and its horrors stole part of his soul, part of his heart, forever. The drinking was his escape, a way to dull the sharpest edges of memories he never wanted to have, and wanted desperately to forget. Even as an adult, I can hardly blame him for that.
But as a child, I didn’t know any of this. He never let me see that.
We, instead, concentrated on things like scaring the bejeezus out of Gramma by bringing in a sleeping fruit bat on a branch we snapped from the hedges in the backyard. Oh, how Grampa laughed, that deep, hearty laugh that gets wheezing and hoarse at the end…
He died when I was 13 or so. Cancer. A rather agonizing and undignified end for a man who deserved so much more than that. (The universe and I will have words over that someday.)
And I’m sad sometimes that he’ll never know me as a grown up, never know my beautiful daughter, miss my mother as a new generation of grandparents who spoil their grandkids rotten, never know my brother as the truly good man he’s grown up to be.
But I know he’s here. He just is. Up there, in the cosmos somewhere, laughing at me and teasing me like always, and protecting me.
You taught me more than school ever could have, Grampa. I wish you were here today for me to express things in the words that I never would have had as a kid. The fact that you’re a hero to me. That I could never understand the pain you felt, but that I forgive you for all of the ways you had to fight it. That I might not be loud about my beliefs all the time, but I hold your sacrifices very close to my heart.
But then again, maybe you’re listening anyway.
Love you and miss you. Thank you for everything.
