Grandfather's Philosophy

I was in my between years when my grandfather, Albert John Fry, died. At the age when one neither knows who they are, where they came from, nor what lies ahead. Mom and dad shielded my sister and me from grandfather’s sickness and his passing. Our lack of years made us impressionable, like soft clay waiting for a mould to take shape. They did not want death to upset their young daughter and older son, did not want to risk a lifelong imprint. They thought to spare us suffering by limiting contact with our grandfather in the hospital, and later, in the funeral parlour’s viewing room. Duly sheltered and protected, my memories remain distant from the events leading up to my grandfather’s passing, which forces me to remember him as he lived.

I always felt connected to my father’s father. He projected an uncomplicated demeanour absent judgement or condemnation, the very same way a knight of old must have worn his armour, proud and impenetrable. When he held me in his gaze, I felt myself grow taller. It felt as though I possessed a limitless potential to become anything I wanted.

Grandfather had eyes that twinkled differently for each person that fell under their delight. His pale blue eyes noted and accepted the totality of one’s shortcomings, and then catalogued those esteemed traits as that which bequeathed uniqueness and special value upon the individual. Of course, as a youngster zooming through life, I had no inkling that by voicing neither crippling criticisms, nor uttering finicky complaints, he sowed seeds of confidence and courage that would stand me well in later years.

Every now and again when we visited our paternal Grandparents’ house, the one with the red shingles, Grandfather often escorted me into his upholstery shop out back. Within those dusty hallowed halls where few females dared enter, rightly fearing spiders and cobwebs aplenty, he allowed me to tack stuff with a magnetic hammer that picked up nails and other small pieces of metal. I enjoyed pretending that I helped him upholster furniture by putting a tack into any non-metal surface, be it a wall, a bench, and sometimes, even a chesterfield or an armchair.

Whenever my father ran errands for his parents, Grandpa was placed in charge of the grandchildren. He possessed the rare ability to be still and quiet, to sit in a room chalked full of the boisterous bedlam of kids roaring in play, while maintaining an unruffled exterior. He had but to offer to recite a story and I’d gather around his feet at the foot of the chesterfield and listen to the antics of Harvey, a three-legged bear who dreamed of becoming an Olympic tree climber. A calm and gentle serenity cloaked Grandfather at those moments like oil paint upon canvas, full of peaks and valleys that make it necessary to view it from all angles to appreciate its entirety.

After supper, after the sun had set and it was time to go home, Grandpa sidled up beside me and clandestinely pressed a dollar or two into my hand. “For candy,” he said, and then gave my wrist a little squeeze. “Try to do what your mother says.” At the same time, he wore a smile that said, do not forget to have a little fun each day.

My father’s father was a quiet man who held stalwart ideals.

It is difficult for me to picture my tranquil and gentle grandfather operating heavy artillery in WWI, but he did. Cloaked in youthful invulnerability, too young to join the war effort at seventeen, he lied about his age and entered boot camp. Twelve weeks later, alongside other young and patriotic men, he boarded a crowded troop carrier feeling the adventurous excitement of the era. He was deployed overseas, sent to Dieppe to fight a beach battle on France’s north coast, followed by another glorious encounter in Italy. Following five years of service, Grandfather returned home a quieter and more appreciative man, grateful for the little things youthful years often overlooked. When WWII rolled around, he re-enlisted.

Grandfather served his country and never felt the need to remind anyone with glorious war stories that I would have gladly listened to him recite. I often imagined what it would have felt like to have held his rifle and to have placed an imaginary enemy in its sights. Oh, the joy to have attached the bayonet, and to have tried on his uniform. I would have eagerly set his heavy steel helmet upon my head and struck off across the lawn hunting Nazis, but the Great Wars changed his measure of what made a man, a man.

Instead of regaling me with brave and bloody war memories, he entertained me with boyhood stories about my father, caused coins to vanish and reappear from one hand to the other, magicked shiny silver dollars out from behind my ears, and showed me mystifying card tricks, at any moment about to bequeath an Indian wrist burn that made me laugh and wriggle and flop around like a fish in a canoe. And he could whistle like a songbird.

His favourite whistle was a warbling birdcall that swept up and down and around and back again. Not once did I imagine his trill belonged to an actual bird. It never occurred to me that in the trenches among booming howitzers, amid the chatter of Thompson machine guns and exploding artillery shells, squeezed between cries and screams of pain and agony, or hiding in the mustard gas clouds where each breath was precious, freedom and songbirds were extinct. I lacked the life reference to understand why he esteemed a songbird’s liberty. That wondrous warble was simply a complicated song my untrained tongue troubled to imitate.

One evening many years later, while I strolled through a Douglas fir and cedar forest whose ancient trunks gave way to a marshy apron circling the tip of a placid little lake, I heard Grandfather’s warble upon the Vancouver Island wind. That lively and joyous trilling transported me back to his red-shingled house with its deep front lawn. It plopped me down on that comfortable orange chesterfield opposite a console colour television whose picture always had too much green tint. Familiar smells and textures flared into my memory bright and cheerful. Mom, Grandma, and Sis are talking and laughing animatedly in the kitchen while they prepare supper. The smell of brown-sugar glazed carrots that I liked so much filled the air. Dad watches television wearing a quirky little smile, and Grandpa is seated beside me whistling his birdcalls happy as a lark, ever so glad we came to visit.

I shall never forget those Grandfather Days.

Hesitantly walking down, a hospital’s sterile hallway gripping my father’s hand ever so tightly is nearly the last memory I own of my grandfather. Bleak white tiles echoed each of our footfalls, loud and hollow. Halfway down the corridor, we entered a stark-white hospital room home to a lonely table and a hospital bed with raised, silver-chromed guardrails. The stacked cinderblock walls were unadorned but for a tiny portrait of Mother Mary that hung lonely and abandoned at the foot of the bed. A tall, silver candy cane IV-holder dripped clear white fluid into a blue-veined hand covered with brown spots.

Between those shiny bars laid my grandfather, all broken down and busted up, emaciated by cancer until he barely dented the mattress. No heavier than a bird whose songs he once imitated. His bleary-red eyes were glassy and far, far away. That magic sparkle was nowhere to be found. It had been replaced by a milky sheen. I doubt that he felt me touch his hand. His skin felt parchment dry and cool beneath my warm fingertips. We could not stay long. I could not climb up beside him, or even tug at his PJ sleeve. Neither my sister nor I were permitted to speak to him at length other than to mutter a hasty hello, and a grim and heavy good-bye.

Today, decades later, I understand that death perched on his window ledge that dreadful spring morning. But on that day, I never realised Grandfather’s life ebbed with each shallow and rattling gasp, the next breath more halting than the previous one; I never understood what bloodless lips meant; could not fathom that day of days was the last time I’d see him alive. Had I been a little older, a little more worldly, I would have loosed my best warble and damn the consequences of shattering hospital ward silence. I’ve been known to fracture a rule or two in my day, so it comes with some irony that I missed an opportunity to lay waste to a small rule with great cause. My still and quiet grandfather would have liked my departing warble, I think.

It was bright and sunny outside the hospital on that day so long ago, now. It was neither rainy, nor overcast, nor sombre grey. Not depressing in the least. Perfect weather for songbirds to perform. Thus, it grants me some small satisfaction to imagine that my cherished grandfather listened to birdsongs those last long and lonely days, during those horrible hours when the pain became so very, very bad, and he wished for wings to fly away and leave it all behind. You see, he had returned to trench warfare where he struggled again to survive, knowing this time that he would going to an earthy rest, all the while trying to part the pain that stole the song from his lips.

Now that I have a few decades behind me, I have lived long enough to appreciate his goodness, and to note the rare value men like my grandfather possessed. It is an everlasting decency that lives on in each of us long after the owner has departed this world for the next. My father owns that quality as well, though he would never tell you so. Recognising the decency in my father came years after I noted it in his father. Such is the way of sons and fathers. We do not always acknowledge our daily gifts; do not always realise what stands before us plain as day, more valuable than sunken treasure.

Now and again as I head out upon a wooded walking path, I listen for Grandfather’s warbling trill. On those days when it arrives, I imagine that he has returned to share a moment or two, perched far, far above me looking down, no longer in pain, come to cheer me along my way, to remind me of his philosophy: the measure of a man is found in the memories he leaves behind. And I remind myself that so long as I draw breath, I have a duty to create kind and gentle memories of my own.