A long, hot day

In the basement, in an open shoe box full of manuals for small appliances long-disappeared from the world, I spotted a pair of letters I had sent my grandparents when I was a child. Here’s a sentence from one written in an uneven but readable cursive, when I was nine: “At school today I stayed after to help my teacher we cleaned trash cans we’re going to paint pictures on them protecting againast pollution for earth day.” This sentence was followed by a brief, questionable anecdote: “When I was cleaning a trashcan out I had my head inside and my friend didn’t know and he squirted inside the trashcan with the hose and got the back of my head all wet”….

In the fierce heat of the afternoon, the sky was free of a single cloud as I biked west on Overland. I reached the rehab center almost feverish, hoping to find the usual carafe of ice water by the sink in Grandpa’s room. He was asleep on the bed, propped up, and I got a cup of water and sat down next to him. He looks older when asleep, and ancient when awake. He wore his usual khaki pants with a wide black belt; his short-sleeved shirt was tucked into his pants up to the bottom edge of the two breast pockets, the pockets full of scraps of paper and pens.  He had on black shoes with Velcro straps, white socks pulled up tight, a wrist watch loose on his bony wrist. His mottled hands were crossed on his lap, and his hoary head still looks naked after his recent short haircut. His face was slack, and at moments his breathing would grow labored, then smooth out again.

The television was on with the sound muted. An episode of Bonanza was showing. Two men drove a horse-drawn wagon onto a fake homestead; the show’s studio sets were ridiculously bad, the color terrible—the “land” and everyone’s faces a sickly orangey hue. But Ben Cartwright was an imposing, reassuring presence. He’s long dead now, Hoss too, and Little Joe.  Pretty much all the actors on the western shows Grandpa likes are dead….

The rehab center is a place that seems to operate very much in the present. What can a patient do, or what can be done for the patient, today? But the present there is mostly empty, uneventful, slow. Not much happens. Long stretches of daytime tv, naps, silence…punctuated by bits of therapy, a meal. People do get visits, but even those can be strained: we’re all waiting, for the person to get better, or not, and either way it’s a slow process. All the patients are over eighty, they have broken down, and the future is uncertain. Hopefully visits help keep a person’s spirits up, or maybe just provide company for a time.

But if the present is dull, the future vague, the past remains full of experience, eighty, ninety years of material…. Grandpa likes to tell stories, I like to hear them. I’ve heard most of them before, but that doesn’t matter. I visit him to be helpful but also to reassure myself that what I have known I can still know. Time and change press on, and wear him out, but I hold on to what I can still get.  I stay in is house, as I have for some many years, even if he’s down the road. I sit with him and listen, though most days lately he has less to say.

An attendant came into the room, loud and cheerful. “Patrick!” he boomed, “I have a milkshake for you!” Grandpa slowly came out of his nap. He scooted himself up in the bed, rubbed his forehead…. He unmuted the television. Big Valley had come on. After a couple minutes he dropped back off….

Later, I went over to Rosemary’s for a barbeque. We talked about Grandpa and his lawn. The guy who mowed it last time, Randy, won’t return Mike’s calls. Apparently, Grandpa had got on the phone and given him specific and detailed instructions, then insisted on negotiating down the original agreed-upon price. The guy did it, but it seems he’s not interested in doing it again…. Mike told about how a couple years ago when the house was painted, Grandpa had been out the whole time directing the work. And he tried to get them to clean out the gutters, among other extra tasks. Mike had made an effort to mediate, but the painter, once finished, said, “never again.”

“It’s always been about money,” Mike said. “He thinks everybody charges too much.” When Mike was a kid, Grandpa decided he could cut his hair, his brother Kelly’s too. “Of course he didn’t know what he was doing. He had us there in the backyard for two hours, and we were crying, but it didn’t matter.” Not just money, but control.

I’ve only ever been a short-time visitor, and my relations with Grandpa are much less fraught. He’s a difficult man, to say the least, inflexible, obstinate. But we just sit together, and our whole long history is composed almost only of episodes of sitting together…. And I want to keep on coming back to Idaho for more of the same, but he just keeps getting older and older.