The Tree on the Dock

This story ends on a downbeat, but I don't want to emphasize that. I'll say it up front first. My Grandpa killed himself when I was nine years old.

We found out on an early spring afternoon the day it happened. My brother and I were in our shared bedroom playing a little kid version of football. It resembed actual football only inasmuch as we used a football to play it. There were no rules, per se, and I don't even think we kept any sort of score. It was mainly an excuse to shove one another around on the carpet next to our bunk beds like sumo wrestlers.

The phone rang downstairs, which didn't even scratch our attention. Phonecalls were part of the adult world and utterly inconsequential to our mad, hyper, essentially tiny world of Empire Strikes Back bedspreads and Space Legos and Cleveland Browns posters. Half a minute later, we heard mom make a noise, a sort of restrained scream. I didn't know the word "woe" back then, but when I learned the word, years later, I thought of the sound that mom made that day and understood it immediately. Kev and I stopped playing football instantly and looked towards our open bedroom door, towards the half flight of stairs that led down to the living room and kitchen, ultimately toward the source of that terrible, alarming sound from mom. The conversation that had been droning on down there was eerily hushed now. Dad's voice did most of the talking. No more sounds of woe came from mom. We went back to playing football.

Kev had possession a few minutes later and we were assuming the sumo-football position again when dad came upstairs and knelt down next to us. He told us quietly and as carefully as he could that grandpa had died. I understood it but I didn't get it. I think the same was true for Kev. When dad finished telling us (grandpa had been his father; it was a very short speech), Kev moved to start the game again. Dad gently asked him if he knew what it meant that grandpa had died. We both said yes. We both went back to playing again, with that new knowledge there, working its way into our minds like a seed putting down slow, slow roots.

That night, mom and dad were gone. I didn't know then where they'd gone and I don't know now. They were evidently attending to all those terrible mundanities of arranging a funeral, helping grandma cope, figuring out how much it was all going to cost and how they were going to pay for it. The old lady that lived in the farmhouse a half mile distant from our house came and stayed with Kev and I. Her name was Mrs. Byers. She and her husband were friends of mom and dad's. We used to walk to their house on summer evenings and play shuffleboard on their long, immaculately tarred driveway. The Byers's were like secondary grandparents to Kev and I. That night, Mrs. Byers let me stay up late and watch TV with her after Kev went to bed. On the whole, it was sort of a treat, although the show (some miniseries with lots of pirhannas and vampires and stampeding rhinos and obviously wildly tangential storylines) wasn't as good as I had hoped it would be.

I cried for the first time over grandpa's death at the funeral. I was ashamed of the tears, and I couldn't go look at the body, because I knew they would be uncontrollable if I did. I sat way back in the last row of the taupe folding chairs arranged in the little, non-air-conditioned funeral home and cried feircely and quietly, staring at the casket that barely hid his body from view. The tears and the grief were totally new, and even in the throes of the emotion, I marvelled at how powerful they were. It was like watching a thunderstorm inside.

Grandpa had left only a few hundred dollars. This, both grandma and mom and dad believed, grandpa would have wanted to go to his grandkids, Kev and I and my cousin Jenny. I am sure they were right. After the funeral, mom and dad took us out to go on a little shopping spree with grandpas last couple hundred dollars. It was dizzyingly thrilling to us, and I think it was a salve to mom and dad's hearts to watch us enjoy grandpa's affections that way one last time. We went to Hill's department store. Kev and I both got new baseball mitts. I got my first wristwatch. Its face had a little picture of Snoopy wearing a headband and holding a tennis racket. His arms were the watch's hands. The second hand was a tiny tennis ball that turned perpetually around Snoopy, always just out of reach of his racket no matter what time it was. The band was made of denim. I really loved that watch and often thought of grandpa, in a sort of distant, happy way when I looked at it.

To this day I don't know a whole lot about why grandpa did it. I know there was something about some medication he was supposed to be taking but wasn't. I know that despite his monolithic, gibralter-like solidity (to my eyes, at least) he was depressed. I think it had something to do with retiring and something to do with having an illness that grandma always called "sugar". All I know for sure is that it ended with him telling grandma he was going out one day, driving his car to Mr. Wiggs, buying some garden hose, then driving somewhere else to park and use the hose to pipe the exhaust into the car. It was, evidently, a pretty painless way to go.

When I was growing up, grandpa was the biggest man I knew. He worked at a factory that made chains, which was somehow mythical to me. His forearms were gigantic slabs, like rawhide stretched over steel cables. His belly was huge but incredibly tough, like a medicine ball under the fabric of his light blue short sleeve button-down shirt, through which could always be seen the ghost of a strappy tee-shirt. He always wore a black leather pocket-protector His hands were like grapples, bigger than my head. He had a perpetual crew cut, steely gray with a hint of black lingering above his ears. His face was like something made from granite, but not because it was hard; because it was so solid-looking, so essentially kind but immovable.

Grandma and grandpa lived in a small two story house with a little front porch and a larger, enclosed side porch. Unlike us, they lived in a neighborhood with very close neighbors, some of whom were their best friends, some of whom they had ongoing, petty squabbles with. The polotics of the neightborhood intrigued and amused me, partly because we lived in the country with very little by way of neighbors ourselves (apart from the Byers), and partly because the neighborhood was so essentially old and close that it was like an extended family with little alliances and fueds and ongoing inherited histories. Grandma and grandpa's house was on a corner lot one row of house removed from the Sandusky bay. The enclosed side porch, a tiny glassed-in room with very incongruous rainbow-striped carpeting (something bought on deep-discount, I am sure) and the pull-out sofabed completely filling one end, looked down a short length of dead end street and straight out over the bay.

The bay was, and is, magical to me. It was moody. Sometimes it was blue-green and laughing, throwing up confetti bits of spray around the dock. Other times it was mean and cold, gray as slate and choppy. On those days, reflecting the marching clouds that looked so low and busy over its flat horizon, the bay looked hungry and full of mystery. On those days I'd believe that the bay had grisly secrets: sunken ghost ships that arose at night and prowled the mists, seaweed choked skeletons that crawled blindly in the depths, seeking shore and long-lost loved ones. Like most boys , I wanted to believe those terrible things. I loved them and was terrified of them.

Grandpa loved the bay, too. Or so it seemed. Now I don't know if it was love or something else.

Kev and I would take turns spending a week with grandma and grandpa every year. I remember it was the highlight of my summer. I'd spend the days being fed grandma and grandpa's unique diet of TV dinners, Cup 'o Soup, greasy "hamburgs" covered in onion powder, and bowls of sugary cereal for bedtime snacks. We invariably ate off of folding trays in front of the television watching Hee Haw or westerns. Afternoons were spent playing with Marty and Chris, two kids from across the street, in their sandbox, or swimming off the tiny crescent of rocky beach next to the dock. There was virtually no sand at the beach, but there was a lot of gravel and scree, as well as the occasional interestingly rotting carp. What made the beach particularly magical though, despite the smell and the peasoup green water sucking at the rocks, was the gems. I knew they weren't real gems, but what did I care? They were sparkly and multicolored and myriad, dotting the beach in their hundreds and thousands. The story dad told me to explain the phenomenon was this:

Once, many years ago, when dad himself had been little, there had been a factory further along the shore of the bay. The factory made glassware: bottles, glasses, jars, cups and saucers, all sorts of different colored glass containers. A glass factory produced quite a lot of broken glass bits which the factory dumped very economically into the bay. Over the years, the smaller glass bits were carried by the tide, coming slowly back ashore all along the edge of the bay. Interestingly, the scouring of the water had left all the bits softened and dulled, essentially harmless to little naked feet and fingers. The results were the gems of the beach: curved traingles, irregular prisms, shallow broken concaves and lenses. The colors were myriad: shell pinks and dark bottle greens and midnight blues that were only a few shades from black until you held them up to the sun. There were even occasional bits with vine patterns or runic letterings stamped into them. Every now and then I'd collect some of the more interesting pieces, but never for long. There were too many to collect. And besides, the beach wasn't going anywhere. The gems would always be right there, no matter what.

The dock was actually a tiny man-made peninsula. It was formed by an outline of old creosote-soaked railroad ties, stacked and pegged together with iron bars, and then filled in with dirt and large, jagged white rocks. The dock stretched about forty yards out into the bay. It was maybe ten yards wide and had a dogleg to the left at the end. I didn't know who had built it, but it had to have been long, long ago, because a tree had grown on the dock. It grew a little further than half-way out, and it was huge. It was a weeping willow, its trunk fat and curved, deeply scored with ancient bark. It looked prehistoric to me, especially standing all alone out there among the spider-infested, bone-white rocks, enormous, draping its trailing whip leaves out over and into the water on both sides. There was only ever one boat tied to the dock during my time there, and it was a neighbor's little white rowboat, the oars tucked neatly inside and fishing tackle stored under the seats. The dock jutted out into the water to the left of the little shingle of beach. When we'd swim out into the bay from the beach, I never got very close to the slick, seaweedy black walls of the dock. I had explored the dock from the top, but for some reason I hated being near it from the water. There was something deeply awful to me about the trailing willow branches, bobbing limply on the water. Worse was the sound the waves made as they lapped against the stacked railroad ties: a sort of mushy sucking and smacking. It made me think of the secrets of the bay, the leaden, hungry look of the waves on windy days just before a storm.

I slept on the enclosed sunporch, in the big pull-out sofabed. Grandma and grandpa always let me stay up until they went to bed, promptly after the weather forecast on the eleven o'clock news. Then, I'd pull the cushions off the couch and grandma would help me unfold the bed. She'd put a sheet and a blanket on it and a couple of huge pillows and then she'd tuck me in. By that time of night, the porch's many windows were covered with brown slatterned shades that unrolled down on complicated string riggings that were completely incomprehensible to me. Grandma would give me an old Philco transistor pocket radio to sleep with, and I would tune it to WJR, the AM talk station out of Detroit. I'd play it very softly under my pillow. At midnight on weeknights, for years, the same radio show would come on. It was called Night Flight, and it was a sort of musical variety show. The host played soothing songs all night long, interspersed with his own melodic banter and the occasional odd non-musical recording of a comedy routine or a speech. The thing I loved most about the show was that it was presented as a journey, an all night flight to a different location every night. The show started like this:

Announcer, accompanied by sound effect of an airliner advancing down a runway, lifting off: "Night Flight 760, now departing Detroit International Airport..."

Host, with continued airliner sounds, diminishing to a gentle, distant roar: "Good evening, and welcome aboard Night Flight 760. I'm your captain, Jay Roberts, and tonight our destination is Phoenix Arizona, home of Heard Museum's excellent Native American displays, and Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture studio at Taliesin West. Our flight time tonight will be approximately six hours, so feel free to sit back and relax. There are pillows and blankets in the overhead bins if you'd like to sleep some of the way. Or, if you prefer, there are magazines in the seatback ahead of you. Either way, I'll be playing some music as we travel and keeping you company throughout the flight. For now, let's set the mood for the initial portion of our flight with this melody from the great Mel Torme and his enduring classic, 'California Suite'."

And so on. I'd go to sleep to such, and awaken occasionally throughout the night enough to listen to more, drifting in and out to songs like "Send in the the Clowns" (which, hearing for the first time, I found heartbreaking in the leaden depths of the night) and "In the Mood". I became faintly acquainted with bygone musicians like Count Basie and Louis Armstrong. Once I woke up in the predawn hours to hear a recording of an old comedy routine by Bob Newhart. I lay there, mummified in the blankets on the sunporch, the corner streetlight filtering through the shades in tiny stripes, and laughing into my pillow. It was hilarious, and I fell back asleep thinking all about it.

Grandpa almost always got up and left for work long before I ever woke up. The few times I was up and around with him in the morning made strong, nearly graphical impressions on me. The kitchen and dining area of their house was one tiny room just inside the front door. There was a formica topped table pushed against the wall under the single window. It had three matching chairs and a retractable lamp hanging over it. Grandpa would sit there in the dim pink dawnlight from the window and drink a coffee kind of drink called Pero. Grandma would invariably be at the sink or the stove. There was very little talk. I remember grandpa's lunchbox and his Thermos, the classic mottled green cylinder with the silvery screw off cap that you could drink out of. Years later, I asked for and received an identical Thermos from my wife for Christmas, and it was only after I unwrapped it and held it that I knew I had wanted it because grandpa had had one.

Memories of grandpa are like home movies with no sound. I don't even remember what his voice sounded like or the kind of things he'd say. He was the classical quiet type, I guess.

I remember watching him as he cleaned some perch he'd caught in the bay. He did it down in the basement, in a nook under the stairway. He used some electric tool to clean the scales off. I remember the sound of it, slightly harsher than an electric razor, but otherwise the same. I remember the smell of the fish, and my fascination with the way he'd cut them open, gut them, filet them for Grandma to fry up later that night. The basement was small but tidy, with work benches against two walls and what seemed like hundreds of tools hung neatly and categorically on brown pegboard.

I remember him walking home from work. The factory, Union Chain, was only a couple of blocks away, across a tree scattered grass lot with a baseball diamond on one corner. I'd walk down to the corner to meet him at the lot at twenty after three in the afternoon. The factory loomed over the park, all sooty, dust-choked banks of windows swivelled open, meandering ductwork, vents, smokestacks and blank metal doors. Noises came from the windows, distant voices, clangs, machinery. I never knew what it looked like inside, but I had this mental picture of something like an industrial version of Dante's Inferno: mostly shadows clogged with monumental chugging machines, lit only by the glow of molten metal in giant vats, glinting dully off anvil shapes and sweating, grimy, gritty men with hammers and strange, huge tools.

Grandpa would appear with thirty or forty other men as they all emerged slowly from the factory like ants leaving an anthill. They all looked happy enough, but weary. They scattered over the park in twos and threes, all of them walking home, slipping into the dense web of residential streets all around the factory. Grandpa would walk with two or three other men. He'd see me from far off, sitting on the corner waiting. He'd smile, but he wouldn't wave. As they got to where I waited and then joined them, the other men made a bigger fuss over me than grandpa did, but that never bothered me. They'd ruffle my hair and talk about how big I was, but Grandpa just guided me with a huge hand on the back of my head, or took my hand in his huge, calloused, meaty grapple. I knew he was always happy to see me, happy in a way that went completely through the loud, jovial happiness of the other men and out the other side, into something unspoken and somehow gigantic. But sad. Always sad.

My biggest and most substantial memory of grandpa, though, is the one I saw the most. Evenings at grandma and grandpas were almost indistinguishable from one to the other. Grandma made dinner early. We were usually done by five-thirty or so. And while she cleaned up, grandpa and I would go to the sun porch together. I'd play on the floor with my Legos or draw on scraps of cut apart paper bags and grandpa would just sit. He'd usually have something to drink in his huge, rocklike hand, and it was usually a glass of Cherokee Redpop with a pile of icecubes ticking inside. I would play on the floor by him, on that crazy rainbow striped carpeting, and he would just sit, his head turned toward the strip of bay we could see just past the dead end, watching the sun dip down into the water, laying its reflection out on the waves in a mad, glittering stripe. He'd sit that way for an hour or two, until the sky was a fading red ember and the glass in his hand was empty, beaded with ice cube sweat. Then he'd heave himself out of his big easy chair and go into the adjoining living room and turn on the TV for the night. And I'd follow.

That's all.

These are good memories. These are the things that made me, that still make me. I am, practically speaking, nothing like my grandpa. He was huge and quiet, a laborer, smiling but always, somehow, sad. I am huge as well, but goofy, never without something to say, a digital artist making a living on my butt in front of a computer. The only manual work I do, I do at the gym, on purpose, to avoid becoming a complete sloth. And yet, I have grandpa's blood in me, making me. I am formed by him, marginally because his genes define me, but mostly because I looked at him when I was growing up, studied him intently, and I said "this is what a man is." He was far from a perfect man-- I know that more now than I want to. But he was perfect to me then. Perfect enough, at least. He was Manhood. Even today, I climb that granite mountain that he still is in my memory, and I strive to be that sort of Man, too. To pick up where he left off. Ultimately, to get it right where he, eventually, couldn't.

And today I see my son look at me with those eyes. God, oh God it is so eerie, so humbling, so haunting. It's as if time laps back on itself and I am the one in the chair with the Cherokee Redpop sweating in my enormous hand. I am the one being watched by this little man that is so very, very much like me. What will I make Manhood to be for him? What mountain am I carving in his little heart, that will grow with him and become the mountain he climbs to be a Man? I hope it is a good mountain, an even better mountain. I hope so.

But I am grateful for my own mountain, the silent, solid granite mountain of my grandpa, and the distant, lost world he represents to me.

I hope I represent it well.