Grandpa was in the therapy room when I arrived, on the
bicycle with ten minutes of his twenty minute session still to complete. I
pulled up a stool and sat down, but he didn’t notice me at first; he doesn’t
seem to have very good peripheral vision, and his hearing is such that he
doesn’t immediately detect the small sounds of another’s presence. I scooted up
into view and he stopped pedaling to talk, but after a moment he started moving
again. He kept pausing when he talked, and I was nervous that the therapist
would come over and say something. Not a reprimand but some sort of gentle
encouragement that would embarrass us both….
When he was finished, the therapist brought over a new type
of walker (new to him), one with four wheels instead of two. She convinced him
to take a walk outside; I returned to his room and sat reading a book. I don’t
like to compete with the therapists for his attention, plus I have to socialize
with them. Grandpa inevitably names my hometown and profession, and then they
want to tell me how they are horrible writers, and what can I say to that, an
admission I have heard far too many times….
They were gone much longer than I expected, and when they
finally came into the room, the therapist said, “Well, thanks, Pat, for that
trip down memory lane.” She leaned over, bent towards him as she spoke, a form
of body language common among the staff when dealing with the elderly
residents. He introduced me to her, and she told me her name was Melissa. She
had a blonde bob, a wedding ring on her finger, and after Grandpa stated my key
identifying characteristics she went for geography over job. “I’m from South
Dakota,” she told me, and I asked where, and she said I probably wouldn’t know
it, but I was up for the challenge, and she was wrong: Milbank, in the
northeastern corner of the state, yes, I’ve been there. Though I admit it runs
together in my mind with a number of other large small towns in eastern South
Dakota.
“I was back there for my high school reunion,” she said,
“last year, and I was surprised at the accents, you know, they all sound like
that movie Fargo.” She doesn’t think
she has it anymore. “But sometimes my husband will make fun of me, especially
when I say ‘about.’” She laughed, and I smiled, and Grandpa said, “Well, you
have to be from somewhere.” Yes, I
thought, good point.
Melissa repeated her “memory lane” line before she left, and
apparently Grandpa was warmed up. “I spoke to your mother this morning,” he
said. Recounting that conversation, which was about her coming to visit, got
him talking about schedules, and that led eventually to him asking when I
started teaching again, and that brought him to when he had first started
school. “You know,” he said, “I didn’t start until I was seven.” The topic
progression wasn’t rapid, but it was sure and inevitable: all roads lead back
to his youth, to the 1920s and 1930s.
“Mom had kept me out of school, there was some sort of
sickness, I think it was whooping cough” (he pronounced “whooping” without the
“w”). But in the fall of 1927 he was
allowed to begin. “That school was at the Catholic church, which was on the
other side of town from our house. This was in Greeley…. That first day I
wasn’t in any rush, I sort of took my time getting there… dawdled, you might
say…. And when I got there I finally went in, and all the kids were in the room
and there was Chuck was sitting right in the middle at a desk.” He laughed;
Chuck was his brother and two years younger. “Mom couldn’t keep him at home,
he’d thrown a fit and said he was going. So she brought him, and the nun said,
that’s okay, he can stay.” Grandpa laughed again. “So Chuck and I had the same
first day of school.”
But Chuck didn’t stick. He soon discovered school wasn’t as
fun as exciting as he’d been led to expect. “Course, I was older than all those
kids. After a few months the nun said, you can go on up, and I was jumped a grade.” A few years later he
was promoted another grade, and then he was with kids his own age. “I graduated high school in 1938,” he said.
“But Chuck, he never did finish, or at least not till after the war. Same with
Jimmy” (another brother). They both joined the military, or were called up,
during their senior years. Chuck was a medic in Europe, mostly Italy, I think,
and the story is he left with brown hair and came back with white. Jimmy was
sent to the South Pacific.
Chuck sailed from Portland, on a big troop ship. “We drove
over there to see him off,” Grandpa said. “Mom and me, and Jeanette” (his sister).
I wondered about that drive, both coming and going, what they had all been
thinking, especially his mother, Liz. But Grandpa didn’t say anything about
that. Instead he told how when they got back, he’d been leaving the house in
New Plymouth to walk to the store where he worked, just a few blocks away, when
he noticed what looked like something on one of the back tires. It was the tube
showing through the worn tread. “I don’t know how we got home,” he said.
“I had bought a pair of tires for that car, just before they
started the rationing.” He shook his head. “I should’ve bought four…. I don’t
know why I didn’t.” The regret remains palpable in his voice, seventy years
later. “Once they was rationing you could only get those recaps. But they
weren’t much good. They tended to fall apart….” He went on to tell about
getting a set of tires re-capped down in Boise—“that Firestone place is still
there, over on Fairview”—but they over-heated them in the process, or something
like that, and the tires failed after only a hundred miles. He’s had a poor
opinion of both re-caps and Firestone ever since.
I left soon after his dinner came. I gave him an awkward hug
as he sat in his wheelchair, then put a hand on his frail and bony shoulder. He
told me to “Be careful,” then said it again as I walked out through the door of
the room.
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