Grandpa

He looked like he was trying to smile when I talked to him. You had to put yourself in his gaze, because his head wasn’t moving. And when I did, to say goodbye, the right part of his lip moved.

The only other part of him that moved was his chest, which filled up with air often enough to look uncomfortable. His chest pressed upward a teal blanket, which hid his gaunt frame, in a struggle to breathe. The oxygen machine behind his bed seemed to breathe more easily, sucking air in with a sound like muted cymbals and pushing it out with a thud like a bass drum.

It was one of the first things I heard when I came in the room, where my sister had been sitting singing hymns, apologizing for not getting know him better. His trumpet sat, not played for years, on a shelf above the bed.

I can’t say I knew my grandfather as well as I would have liked. When I was younger, around the time little boys become fixated on violence and war, I asked for accounts of his World War II tours, where he worked a radio. He shot at fewer people than I would have liked, but I was still proud to have a grandfather in such a famous war.

He made my cousins and me things out of wood, such as rabbits that were puzzles, too. I liked that stuff, and tried my hand at it. I made a cow out of his scraps, because they fit together that way and I didn’t have to wait for anyone to help me cut the wood.

He was never quite willing to let go of all the woodworking tools he owned, even after a couple of strokes and a fall that left him unable to get around the house on his own, let alone operate saws. But to him, there was always the possibility that he’d pick them up again.

He wouldn’t let go of some of his musical instruments, either. He was a musician, a trumpeter and a band director for much of his professional life. I remember sitting on park lawns while he played with community symphonies.

In the retirement home, where he was on hospice care, he may have been thinking about when he could move on his own. He may have been thinking about getting out of this world, moving on to the next. With his head cocked to one side, hair streaked, staring blankly near the top of the curtains in a room shared with my grandmother, he may not have been thinking anything at all.

My family congregated in the room. We usually come together like this at Christmas or Thanksgiving. But this time most cried openly.

My grandma left her walker to lean over the bed and kiss him on the cheek, seemingly made more mobile to comfort him. She told him he was going to a better place, and she told me how they never really had any major problems in more than 60 years of marriage.

She told me months earlier that it felt like she had already lost him. He couldn’t talk much, or eat on his own. She was alone, she said.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. What my career path will be. When I’m going to get married – I feel lucky to know to whom it will be, and that she was in the room with me. My grandparents worried about those things once, but now it’s done. The journey of their lives together is over. There’s no dreaming of what it can be, only the reality of what it was. But they lived well. They raised a good family, with three daughters they can be proud of, who, in some cases, followed in their footsteps as teachers and musicians.

I placed myself in his gaze, for the first time all night, and placed my hand on his shoulder. I hoped no one could hear me, I didn’t want it to be a show, thanked him and said goodbye. I tried to act like I wasn’t crying.

The next day, my mom called.

“Grandma thinks he’s gone,” she cried. He was.

“He’s happy again,” my mom said through tears. “He hasn’t been happy for a long time.”

I hope he can play his trumpet again.

Rob and Jess

He knelt there at first. Soon he was on all fours, in a moment where pride and standing upright didn’t matter – barely able to make words of whimpers. His back convulsed as he struggled to breathe so he could speak, perhaps a prayer. She came over to him, wrapped her arms around him, and overtook his cries with her own.

“We’re gonna make it. We’re gonna make it,” she cried. She collapsed back into the arms of the one who had born her, “Mom I can’t do this,” she sobbed.

The last time I saw my cousin Rob cry was at his father’s funeral about a decade ago. He was a teenager standing in a suit near the casket. The second time was the loss of a father, too. But this time he was the father, a man, in a brown sweater, with his wife.

Months ago he and his wife Jess found out she was pregnant with twins. Soon after, they found out one wouldn’t make it, and the other could live less than a day, in a terrible best-case scenario. The baby Jess chose to carry never took its first breath, and on the day of her induced labor, the child’s life was over just before it had begun.

So on this Sunday morning, family had flown in from as far as Texas and Hawaii to this San Diego plot, among hundreds of plots closer together than I’ve seen before, to honor the lives that were almost lived with rose petals.

“More,” said a baby, the daughter of another cousin whose wife was far along in her second healthy pregnancy. She wanted more singing after the gathered finished “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”

“Take care of my boys, God. Give them a kiss for me,” Jess said.

Eighty-Eight Years of the Bright Side

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Virginia smiles when she says her ex-husband moved in near her. She’s not bitter that, after being married for 23 years, he left her for a younger woman, or that she only received one $25 alimony check. She’s not really bitter about anything. These are the best years of her life, the 88 year old says.

Ten red bracelets, matching her red shirt and cardiga, line her right wrist.

“It’s all very inexpensive but I couldn’t enjoy it more,” she says looking at her bracelets. “I’m kind of inventive, this one is really for the hair. But it’s effective this way.”

On this Saturday in the cafeteria at Golden Living of Point Loma, a retirement community, Virginia can choose from a meatball “sandwhich” or a salad. Her friend Walter can often be found erasing the “h” from “sandwhich” on the dry-erase board. Virginia shares a table with Dean, a brilliant pianist. One table over is Larry, an engineer-turned-poet. Beyond Larry is Barbara, who swears about doctors and makes sexual comments to visiting young men.

Some are friends. Some show her how she does not want to be. But her closest companion is a quiet, white-haired woman on the other side of the cafeteria.

***

Virginia was born in Sioux Falls in 1921.

“Iowa?”

“No! South Dakota!” she says.

She didn’t have siblings. A year and 10 months after her birth, her mother died from heart complications caused rheumatic fever, which she got at age 16.

“My father, I guess, was so stunned to be left with a baby daughter and to have his wife pass away that he couldn’t talk about it,” she says. “There were a lot of things I wanted to know. But the questions you have for your mother only your mother can answer.”

At age seven, like many children, she discovered that Santa Clause isn’t real.

Her grandfather, the head gardener and maintenance director at a packing plant, road to work with his best friend. He arrived at work, got out of the car, and walked around the back. His friend didn’t see him.

The friend backed into her grandfather, her grandfather fell down, and the car ran over him.

“Well” he said in the hospital, “I’ll be home for Christmas.”

“Well, you’ll be home but I don’t think in time for Christmas,” Virginia’s aunt Rita said.

“Oh no, not my earthly home. My heavenly home.”

He died Christmas Eve, Virginia says. Her uncle, who usually played Santa Clause for the children, was in no mood to perform. They broke the news.

“It’s quite a blow losing your grandpa and Santa Clause at the same time,” Virginia says.

***

She left Sioux Falls when she was 19, on the tail-end of the Great Depression and before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. She got a job at a jeweler, and soon hit things off with Melvin, whom she met at a dinner party. On their third date he bought her a star sapphire ring. He kept the charm going and by 22, she was married. It wasn’t long before she birthed her daughters Paula and Susan.

Around the time Lyndon B. Johsnon sent half a million troops to Vietnam, Virginia’s American dream seemed to come to a halt.

“Mel was a womanizer,” she says. “I always feel, attractive men, it’s not all their fault, because women throw themselves at them.”

“We need counseling,” she told Mel.

“If you want to go to counseling go ahead. But I’m not interested in saving this marriage,” he said.

They split and soon she got her first and last alimony check. It was the last she received.

She decided the star sapphire Melvin had given her would be more appreciated by Paula. Soon after the exchange, she lost the ring at the beach.

At 45, Virginia re-entered the workforce, getting a job at a Christian Science nursing home. But it wasn’t enough to make the payment on her house. She went back to Sioux Falls with her head low – her daughters in tow, her marriage left behind.

“I hated to go back as a failure. But I did,” she says.

She got a job as a nurse’s assistant at a nursing home, where she was fascinated with the residents.

“Everything happens for the best,” she says. “I don’t care what it is, if I hadn’t had to get that job … [as a cleaning lady] I wouldn’t have gotten to see how much you were loved and wanted by an elderly person.”

Four years ago she found herself on the other side of the sponge baths.

She moved into Golden Living with Joan, now 76, another divorcee who had already been there for years, and the two hit it off.

“When I moved in she was my first roommate, and I never regretted that,” says Virginia. “It’s always been just, how lucky can you get?”

They endure struggles together, racking their brains to figure out which combination of buttons on the black and gray TV remotes will bring the symmetry needed between the cable box and the small television to allow them to flip between channels eight and 10. On Sunday mornings they take turns reading passages aloud from the Bible, because getting to church isn’t as easy as it used to be. Her new companion plays a different role from her old one.

“You always have a special place for the person you’ve met,” she says referring to Melvin. “But you can meet more people that are special. But nobody ever takes the place of one that you dearly loved.”

The special people in her life, her friends, make her happy.

“Yeah, we have each other,” Joan says.

“Sometimes Joan thinks she has too much of somebody who cares,” Virginia says.

“Sometimes, yes,” Joan smiles.

Virginia’s ex moved in down the hall and around the corner. It’s more convenient for their children, now in their 60s, to visit. And she doesn’t mind.

“I still think a lot about Mel,” she says. “You can’t have two children with someone and not have feelings for him.” She says having separate rooms is a better living situation anyway, because they can’t annoy each other.

She reads, she makes crafts with buckets full of scrap paper and zig-zag scissors. She hangs plates, images of roses or the last supper, on her walls. She socializes in the cafeteria. She enjoys her life.

“I face my problems happily,” she says, “because … you have to make your own happiness. And once you learn that you can be happy, and you’ll have a lot of happy people around you.”

Some Sunday

It’s overcast, but I prefer that. Good for the scar. The doctor said to keep the sun exposure to a minimum. Something about the newly forming tissue absorbing the sun super fast and doing something with melatonin.

Why am I upset about exactly? Some tone-of-voice thing? Probably something stupid. It usually is. I’m glad I didn’t make it a big deal. I’d just end up apologizing again. That’s pretty much how it goes.

At least my new suit will keep me warm. It’s a little wet from last night, but today I have more time.

I wrap my Rio De Janeiro towel around my waist and shed my clothes from the waste down. Right leg first. Always the right leg first. Left leg. It’s cold, I won’t leave my suit peeled down. I’ll get fully dressed to run down the hill.

Car’s locked, key’s attached to my leg. I’m running down the hill, in the rust brown canyon that cuts into the sedimentary cliffs. Running hurts. My heel has been bruised for months. I always run on it. It never gets better.

Great, mud. Nothing like going a natural stairway of sedimentary rocks caked with gooey mud.

“Can you hold this for me?” sure, I tell him. He hands me his board, and I wait at the top of the steps hoping not to slip, looking at the lefts at Ab. And the crowd. Everyone must have heard how good it was.

“Dude did you get out yesterday?”

“Yeah I went to Mission but it wouldn’t hold. Just closeout after closeout.”

“Man, the cliffs were firing!”

They were firing. Solid overhead. I only got 20 minutes of dusk after work, squinting at the solid overhead sets, trying to gauge whether they would break on my head.

Paddling. The water is cold on my face when I duck-dive my first wall of whitewash, but my torso is dry in my new suit.

Alec’s out, sitting on the inside. Not a bad idea with so many people in the lineup. Steve must be over at Sub.

“Yo dude.”

“It’s fun out here, man.”

“Yeah looks fun. Steve at Sub?”
“Yeah.”

The first wave isn’t memorable for more than a few minutes. Probably one or two turns, like hundreds of waves before it.

This one’s lining up. Whoa, bad drop. Off-balance. [expletives].

“Shoot, that one was barreling. Would have been sick.”

This one’s going to break too far out. Oh, no one on the outside got it. I’m paddling out and toward the shoulder to the right of the peak, facing the wave. Quick turn, all my weight forward, thrusting toward where I want to be, every fast-twitch muscle fiber in my legs twitching as quickly as it can to give me the momentum I need to join this swell of energy through water in its path toward the shore, broken up by the reef.

My hands press my body up – flat on the surface of the board, instead of wrapped around each rail, slowing the process. The lip starts to reach over the vertical face of the water, I send my weight toward the top, then back down the wall to pick up enough speed to get around the section.

No time for a bottom turn, I get up to the lip again and throw my weight in the opposite direction of my momentum, one of my fins breaks free of the water while I cut back toward the crumbling peak. Two more pumps, I’m thinking about going fast, watching the water go vertical and the crest of the small mountain of water start to curl over and ahead of me. I’m not thinking about earth science, or Shakespeare, or the Point Weekly, or organizing archives at Surfer Magazine. I’m thinking about my bottom turn.

On the second pump I go straight down the face, perpendicular to the cliffs. I lay out, nearly horizontal in the flats and point my inertia straight, up the wave, the timing is perfect. I push at the lip, the lip pushes me back, giving me enough energy to break my fins loose in a vertical snap. With speed from the snap, another solid bottom turn, another vertical snap as the wave collapses on itself for tens of feet across.

It’s overcast, and I’m smiling.

Daytona

The new iPhone made it hard to text and drive. I was great at it with my old antique, slightly dysfunctional phone, but the fancy touch screen made it really hard to watch the road and type at the same time. But my backseat driver kept me in line. She always lets me know if I’m too close to cars, double checks over her shoulder for lane changes, opines on where I should park and notifies me if cars are stopping, whether I’m looking or not. I’m usually looking.

We pulled up to the resort in Daytona in her dad’s big F-150 and checked into the rooms. Her family was visiting the college her brother would attend and would be down to join us in a few hours. It was my second time visiting Florida, a few months after the first, and after a long summer in Oregon, away from my backseat driver, I was ready to be visiting again.

The beds were comfortable, with vividly colored sheets, probably to make the tourists from New York feel like they escaped to somewhere exotic. We laid for a while before going down to the pool.

Her family arrived in time for dinner. We went to the pool deck, set 10 feet above the beach. We chose a white table near the tiki bar. I love getting beer with her dad. My dad, a Nazarene pastor, has never touched alcohol to his lips. We've shared countless father and son memories -- hiking Half Dome, mountain biking in the hills by our house, skiing and snowboarding in Mammoth -- but we’ll probably never have a beer together.

The former fighter pilot ordered a Bass Pale Ale. I did too. The sun was low, giving the brew an ethereal golden-brown glow, the kind of lighting you want to take pictures in. My burger was delicious, my backseat driver was smiling, the beers were cold, the air was warm, breezy and salty and I didn’t have any work to do later that night. I guess that’s a vacation.