I promised last week to write more about my grandfather, who was just officially diagnosed with dementia. It's not an easy thing to write. In one way, it's a relief to have an official name to give his condition. He's been having memory problems and such for a while now. On the other hand, it's also painful to admit that he's susceptible to the same sort of frailties as the rest of us. Grandpa has always seemed to me like he ought to be wearaing a red cape and a big red "G" on his chest. He may not be a hero in the dramatic sense, but there's never been anything he couldn't do.
I'm going to take a moment here and slip in a picture my aunt sent me last week:
This was taken in 1946, when Grandpa was probably in college in Walla Walla. That's him on the left, the smart-alecky-looking young guy in the wide tie. The little three-year-old boy is my dad, Calvin Martin III. (And looking a lot like my boys Long Drink and Visigoth, incidentally.) The old guy on the right is my great-grandfather, Cal Sr., who died a couple of years before I was born. I don't know a lot about him, but my dad once described him as "kind of a ne'er-do-well." He looks a lot like my earliest memories of Grandpa. (For comparison, take a look at my cousin Kenny, who's got three or four years on me. Does he look like these guys, or what?)
Okay, now everyone has a face to connect to the post. My grandfather grew up in Port Angeles, which is a logging town in the soggiest part of Washington. (You know how you can tell a family of old loggers? At my grandparents' golden wedding anniversary, I don't think there was a man of their generation there who had all his fingers.) He went to school at the Seventh-Day Adventist Academy in Auburn, where he married the prettiest girl in the place. (I know she was; he's told me so many times.) He couldn't get into the service after Pearl Harbor because of bad eyesight and a missing trigger finger, so he worked in the Kaiser shipyards in Seattle through the war. While he was there, he took a bad fall and was partially paralyzed. He couldn't take a bath or tie his shoes without his wife's help. Here's where things get interesting, at least for me. He was expecting to take their savings and buy a store somewhere, something he could do without full physical mobility. My grandma put her foot down and said, "No, you need to go to school." I could count on one hand the times Grandma has ever gotten stubborn that I know of, but that was the turning point.
In the 40s, it wasn't common for a guy with a family to work his way through, especially with all the young men coming back with GI bills in their pockets. He found that Walla Walla College was the only place that would let him do it, so he packed up his wife and two small children and headed there. He worked as a hotel desk clerk at night and took day classes, and graduated after two and a half years with a degree in mathematics and a four-point average. Ye gods and little fishes! Can you imagine the kind of skull sweat it takes to do that? (Oh, and he had to put in so much physical work during that time that he was pretty much back to full mobility by the end of it.)
See, that's what has always stuck out about my grandfather. Not only is he determined and bull-headed beyond belief, but he's hands-down the most intelligent person I have ever encountered in my life. Bar none. He went to work for the Corps of Engineers on McNary Dam, then moved on to John Day downriver. The family lived in Goldendale at that time so he could commute, which is how it came to pass that my dad married a local preacher's daughter and I ended up spending my childhood there.
When that dam was done, they went on to Livorno, Italy, Louisville, Kentucky, and finally Frankfurt, Germany, where he retired in 1978. Well, sort of retired. He kept being brought back for special projects, because he had made a name as a top-notch contract negotiator. His modus operandi, he told me once, was to memorize the thick sheaf of paperwork that made up the contract, then gain an edge by quoting it chapter and verse during the negotiations. See what I mean about his brain? It was incredible. He used to amuse himself by doing crosswords in his head (the tough ones, not the kind you see in little newspapers like ours), then filling the answers in afterward.
He and Grandma came back to Goldendale when he retired, primarily because my dad had left us by that time and my sister and I needed them more than the other grandkids. And boy, did I need him, especially. A little boy without a dad is growing up on one leg, as it were. Grandpa undertook to teach me to be a man. He wasn't always effective about it, both because he wasn't terribly patient and because I was more of a know-it-all than even most little boys. But he taught me good manners, and a work ethic, and that not knowing how to do something is no excuse for not figuring it out. And that a man's first duty is to take care of his family, a lesson that I certainly wouldn't have gleaned from my dad at that time. (That would change a few years later.) A lot of what I wrote here I learned directly from Grandpa.
A side note: One of my favorite Grandpa stories to tell is of when I was about ten, and I had once again mouthed off intolerably to my mother. Grandpa got wind of it, and invited me out to their house, where he had just put in a lawn. He pointed to a big pile of broken concrete sitting in the backyard, and told me to move it all to a new pile at the other end of the yard. So I did, sweating and struggling in zero-degree temperatures to lug these big hunks of cement without a wheelbarrow or anything sissyish like that. When the backbreaking job was done, I came into the house expecting to find a hot cup of something and a few words of praise. Instead, Grandpa looked out the window and said, "I changed my mind. I like it better where it was." So out I went again, with numb fingers and running nose, to haul them back to where I had found them. I spoke to my mother rather more graciously for a while after that.
Eventually my mom remarried and we moved to Seattle, a time I still think of as purgatory-in-advance. I spent as much time as I could in Goldendale, staying with my grandparents at Christmas and in the summer. Meanwhile, my dad got his life more or less in order, and we became pretty close. Grandma and Grandpa were present for my first wedding, and supportive while I worked my own way through college. In fact, as I went into my last year, I got a birthday card from them that said, "We're proud of you." That was the first time in my life my grandpa had ever expressed outright approval of me.
See, Grandpa wasn't a talker, at least not about personal things. Oh, he had opinions out the ying-yang, but when it came to interpersonal stuff, he was kind of vinegary and detached. He loved his children and his grandchildren, but seldom if ever told them so to their faces. I remember hearing my whole childhood about one particular pair of my cousins: what nice kids they were, how well they were doing in school, their successes and stories. I was really jealous: why did Grandma and Grandpa like them so much better than us? It wasn't until I was older that I found out from those cousins that they had been hearing the same stuff about us all along.
So it turned out that I wasn't such a disappointment to him after all. Over the years I've gotten pretty good at speaking his language. Whenever I've been serious about a woman, I've introduced her to Grandpa, saying "This is what I'll be like in fifty years. Can you handle that?" (Some could, some couldn't.) I also got a good look into his interior when my dad died. He was the oldest son, and kind of the golden boy of the family, despite some of the self-destructive stunts he pulled in his younger days, because he was so charming you just couldn't be mad at him. When he was fifty, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and died three months later. It was hard on the whole family, but Grandpa took it worse than anyone else. All of a sudden, the man who did crosswords in his head, who could straight-arm a sledgehammer in each hand in his seventies, who knew everything and always came out a winner... was old and weak. He could do anything in the world, but he couldn't keep his oldest son from dying of cancer. I'll bet it's the first thing he'd failed at in his whole life.
He changed a lot after that. I still visited them in Goldendale when I could, although a situation with my ex made it awkward. (Let's not go there.) This year they finally moved out of Goldendale after thirty years, to be closer to my aunts in Seattle. Over the years, he's been slowing down, forgetting things, repeating himself, more than before. And now, at the age of 88, it's official that the one thing that made Grandpa what he is, is failing him.
I don't think I've hugged my grandfather since I was little. I've never told him in so many words that I loved him. To be honest, I think he'd have felt really weird about either one from a grown man, or even a boy over the age of about five. But to anyone who reads this, let there be no doubt that I love my grandfather, and I'm proud as hell to be a lot like him and raise kids who are, too. And I'm going to miss him as he rides off into that sunset.
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