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90 is a Whole Lot
Today is my grandfather's 90th birthday. In the last few weeks, I've found I've been thinking a lot about him and my relationship with him. (Oh, and here's a picture of him I took in February when I was there)
I've only really had one grandparent. My dad's parents were wonderful people, but they lived in California, and I can count the number of times I saw them. His mother died when I was in 5th grade, and his father died in while I was in college (1993 and 2003, I think). My mom's mother died in 1976. The only grandparent I had any substantial relationship with is Poppop.
He remarried at some point around when I was born, and he and his new wife moved from New York City to Lyme, New Hampshire (the next town north from Dartmouth) when I was three - I don't remember him ever living some place else. The 5 hour drive seems short enough now, but when I was a kid I thought it about as far as I could go in a day. We used to go up there sporadically when I was very young. However, when he and his second wife split (she was, by all accounts, a raging psychopath) I started to go up there more often. Each summer starting when I was 5 or 6, my mother would get her break from being a single parent by sending my brother to summer camp and me up to Poppops.
Through those summers, I developed a very close relationship with my grandfather. We went up to Canada for a couple weeks, my only long distance traveling as a little kid except for two trips to see my other grandparents in California. I would garden, go to day camps at Post Pond or at the nearby Science Museum, explore nature, all that. He was always supportive, loving, and there for me. That's not to say there weren't any problems; the big one was always my eating habits. He felt a need to force me to try things; this always ended terribly, and, I think, actually made it take longer for me to overcome these difficulties. However, that aside, he was everything I could have hoped for and more, and a lot of my growing up took place there. He was the only person who tried to stop me from cursing (I remember when I was in elementary school, I used to joke that I had two complete sets of vocabulary, the one I used normally and the one that I used when he was around). He encouraged me to read - his were the first copies of the Lord of the Rings that I read. He even got a dog, Cassie, because I wanted a dog and couldn't have one.
I don't remember when exactly I stopped spending summers with him; I think it was 1995 or 1996, though. Poppop has a gift for getting along with little children; he was the opposite for adolescents. The first time I ever saw this it was actually directed at my brother. Ben had managed to do somethingorother inappropriate on the drive to Pop's, and when we got there, Poppop shouted at him and didn't stop until Ben stormed off. I don't even remember what it was about, I was probably about 9, but I remember even then being able to recognize that my grandfather's reaction was disproportionate to the infraction (pretty impressive, since at that age I tended to think that my brother, who teased me mercilessly, deserved what ever he got!). By the time I was 14, 15, 16, I was getting to experience this for myself; he blew up at me at least 3 times while I was in high school. I probably partially earned it, too, smart ass teenagers, but even so. I only remember one specifically, it had something to do with a TV commercial. Oh, right - he kept commenting meaninglessly on every single damn commercial, and he completely lost it when I asked him to stop because I was trying to concentrate on my homework. Something like that.
Going in to college, a new problem became increasingly evident. I couldn't get along with him. I couldn't "handle" him. He would constantly make meaningless noise - a side effect, I'm sure, of living alone for so many years - like little songs or the comments on the commercials or playing with words. His memory was slipping, too, and I had no patience at all for repeating myself. I didn't want to get annoyed with him, and I'd try so hard not to, but somehow I couldn't help it. It's been hard to accept that even when he annoys the hell out of me, I still love him.
The last year has been extra tough. Cassie, wonderful dog that she was, died in 2001. After that, Poppop got a golden retriever named Keiko. To put it simply, it never occurred to anyone in the family that my grandfather might outlive that dog, so when she died last August, we were all shocked, and it broke my grandfather. At first, we were all seriously worried that he would follow her, he seemed so down about it. Since then, the wheels have slowly turned towards moving my grandfather to Texas to live with my uncle. Then, there was the pneumonia in February which put things in sharper perspective. He's moving next week.
Yet, for all that the family drama has made me want to tear my hair out (especially in March, when he lost his temper at me again, and I was very proud of myself for keeping my cool while getting screamed at) I've been fascinated to find that I no longer seem to get annoyed with him. He is the way he is, and - from what mom tells me - he's always been that way. And he's still my grandfather.
And today he turns 90. We held big family parties when he turned 75, 80 and 85, but with everything else going on it just didn't happen this time around.
He was born in 1918. He was one of the lucky ones in a year when the Spanish flu killed 50 to 100 million people around the world, many of them newborns. He was the youngest of 7 children who shared a teeny tenement on the Upper East Side. His parents and three eldest siblings had immigrated from Poland in 1904 or so. As the youngest, he was in a position of privilege relatively speaking; the hard work of his elders benefited him and, ultimately, he was able to graduate from college. He married my grandmother sometime in the 30's, and my mother was their first child, born in 1944 while Poppop was serving in the army in France and Germany. I've never pinned down all the different things he did to earn a living; he has done so many! But he ended up as a labor negotiator for the Writer's Guild, where he met all kinds of awesome people (I have a signed Isaac Asimov...and he knew Arthur Clarke and other nifty folks too!). My uncle, their only other kid, was born in 1955.
It must have been tough. My grandfather was almost certainly legally insane, though she was undiagnosed my mom thinks she was bipolar or manic depressive; she used to lock herself in her room for weeks on end. Poppop, on the other hand, is sane but dangerously manipulative, with a gift for selective memory and a golden boy complex, all of which can be traced so clearly back to his childhood and being the youngest who could do no wrong.
It's always strange to me, it's almost like my grandfather is two people. On the one hand, he's a wonderful, caring, generous, loving man; a man who has done so very much for me time and again, someone who I know is always there for me. On the other hand, though, he's a manipulative, temperamental man who I've more than once observed to outright use people and behave in a cruel fashion - he once reduced me to tears in a restaurant because I thought the thing he'd made me try was disgusting. I always have a lot of trouble balancing the two images in my head, the man who flipped out at me because I tried to explain that he didn't necessarily have to move out on the same day as his closing, accusing me of treating him like a stranger, opposed to the man who is just giving mom and I his car (a 2003 Subaru Forester). I've been thinking a lot about all of this because of the family drama that's surrounded this move; somehow, on his birthday, I thought I might try to write some of it out and see where I was when I was done.
It's helped a lot. Until I wrote it here, I don't know if I ever realized just what a dichotomy he is, just how confusing and tough that has made things, how it divides my feelings towards him. There's so much more that I haven't even touched on, but I think I'll leave it there, with an insight that might help me to understand more in the future. Time will tell, I suppose.
I've only really had one grandparent. My dad's parents were wonderful people, but they lived in California, and I can count the number of times I saw them. His mother died when I was in 5th grade, and his father died in while I was in college (1993 and 2003, I think). My mom's mother died in 1976. The only grandparent I had any substantial relationship with is Poppop.
He remarried at some point around when I was born, and he and his new wife moved from New York City to Lyme, New Hampshire (the next town north from Dartmouth) when I was three - I don't remember him ever living some place else. The 5 hour drive seems short enough now, but when I was a kid I thought it about as far as I could go in a day. We used to go up there sporadically when I was very young. However, when he and his second wife split (she was, by all accounts, a raging psychopath) I started to go up there more often. Each summer starting when I was 5 or 6, my mother would get her break from being a single parent by sending my brother to summer camp and me up to Poppops.
Through those summers, I developed a very close relationship with my grandfather. We went up to Canada for a couple weeks, my only long distance traveling as a little kid except for two trips to see my other grandparents in California. I would garden, go to day camps at Post Pond or at the nearby Science Museum, explore nature, all that. He was always supportive, loving, and there for me. That's not to say there weren't any problems; the big one was always my eating habits. He felt a need to force me to try things; this always ended terribly, and, I think, actually made it take longer for me to overcome these difficulties. However, that aside, he was everything I could have hoped for and more, and a lot of my growing up took place there. He was the only person who tried to stop me from cursing (I remember when I was in elementary school, I used to joke that I had two complete sets of vocabulary, the one I used normally and the one that I used when he was around). He encouraged me to read - his were the first copies of the Lord of the Rings that I read. He even got a dog, Cassie, because I wanted a dog and couldn't have one.
I don't remember when exactly I stopped spending summers with him; I think it was 1995 or 1996, though. Poppop has a gift for getting along with little children; he was the opposite for adolescents. The first time I ever saw this it was actually directed at my brother. Ben had managed to do somethingorother inappropriate on the drive to Pop's, and when we got there, Poppop shouted at him and didn't stop until Ben stormed off. I don't even remember what it was about, I was probably about 9, but I remember even then being able to recognize that my grandfather's reaction was disproportionate to the infraction (pretty impressive, since at that age I tended to think that my brother, who teased me mercilessly, deserved what ever he got!). By the time I was 14, 15, 16, I was getting to experience this for myself; he blew up at me at least 3 times while I was in high school. I probably partially earned it, too, smart ass teenagers, but even so. I only remember one specifically, it had something to do with a TV commercial. Oh, right - he kept commenting meaninglessly on every single damn commercial, and he completely lost it when I asked him to stop because I was trying to concentrate on my homework. Something like that.
Going in to college, a new problem became increasingly evident. I couldn't get along with him. I couldn't "handle" him. He would constantly make meaningless noise - a side effect, I'm sure, of living alone for so many years - like little songs or the comments on the commercials or playing with words. His memory was slipping, too, and I had no patience at all for repeating myself. I didn't want to get annoyed with him, and I'd try so hard not to, but somehow I couldn't help it. It's been hard to accept that even when he annoys the hell out of me, I still love him.
The last year has been extra tough. Cassie, wonderful dog that she was, died in 2001. After that, Poppop got a golden retriever named Keiko. To put it simply, it never occurred to anyone in the family that my grandfather might outlive that dog, so when she died last August, we were all shocked, and it broke my grandfather. At first, we were all seriously worried that he would follow her, he seemed so down about it. Since then, the wheels have slowly turned towards moving my grandfather to Texas to live with my uncle. Then, there was the pneumonia in February which put things in sharper perspective. He's moving next week.
Yet, for all that the family drama has made me want to tear my hair out (especially in March, when he lost his temper at me again, and I was very proud of myself for keeping my cool while getting screamed at) I've been fascinated to find that I no longer seem to get annoyed with him. He is the way he is, and - from what mom tells me - he's always been that way. And he's still my grandfather.
And today he turns 90. We held big family parties when he turned 75, 80 and 85, but with everything else going on it just didn't happen this time around.
He was born in 1918. He was one of the lucky ones in a year when the Spanish flu killed 50 to 100 million people around the world, many of them newborns. He was the youngest of 7 children who shared a teeny tenement on the Upper East Side. His parents and three eldest siblings had immigrated from Poland in 1904 or so. As the youngest, he was in a position of privilege relatively speaking; the hard work of his elders benefited him and, ultimately, he was able to graduate from college. He married my grandmother sometime in the 30's, and my mother was their first child, born in 1944 while Poppop was serving in the army in France and Germany. I've never pinned down all the different things he did to earn a living; he has done so many! But he ended up as a labor negotiator for the Writer's Guild, where he met all kinds of awesome people (I have a signed Isaac Asimov...and he knew Arthur Clarke and other nifty folks too!). My uncle, their only other kid, was born in 1955.
It must have been tough. My grandfather was almost certainly legally insane, though she was undiagnosed my mom thinks she was bipolar or manic depressive; she used to lock herself in her room for weeks on end. Poppop, on the other hand, is sane but dangerously manipulative, with a gift for selective memory and a golden boy complex, all of which can be traced so clearly back to his childhood and being the youngest who could do no wrong.
It's always strange to me, it's almost like my grandfather is two people. On the one hand, he's a wonderful, caring, generous, loving man; a man who has done so very much for me time and again, someone who I know is always there for me. On the other hand, though, he's a manipulative, temperamental man who I've more than once observed to outright use people and behave in a cruel fashion - he once reduced me to tears in a restaurant because I thought the thing he'd made me try was disgusting. I always have a lot of trouble balancing the two images in my head, the man who flipped out at me because I tried to explain that he didn't necessarily have to move out on the same day as his closing, accusing me of treating him like a stranger, opposed to the man who is just giving mom and I his car (a 2003 Subaru Forester). I've been thinking a lot about all of this because of the family drama that's surrounded this move; somehow, on his birthday, I thought I might try to write some of it out and see where I was when I was done.
It's helped a lot. Until I wrote it here, I don't know if I ever realized just what a dichotomy he is, just how confusing and tough that has made things, how it divides my feelings towards him. There's so much more that I haven't even touched on, but I think I'll leave it there, with an insight that might help me to understand more in the future. Time will tell, I suppose.
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Anyway, seeing all the books piled around him made me smile.
Best wishes!
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I think family in general can be very tough. Sigh.
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