It’s been three years since I last saw Grandpa.
Audra and I brought our (then) nine-month-old to Galveston at my father’s insistence.
“He’s ornery,” Dad had conceded. “But he won’t be around much longer and he needs to meet his first great-grandchild.”
After a debilitating fall that broke his hip, Grandpa chose to remain in his beloved semi-tropical environment.
“Everything’s bigger in Texas,” he’d say over the phone, “and better.”
He must’ve chanted that to himself decades earlier as his rearview mirror swallowed his wife, children, and the unpaid mortgage he left behind.
Dad chose Grandpa’s nursing home. It was a charming five-bedroom house in a suburb of Galveston, not far from the beach. The front yards of the surrounding houses were littered with children’s ride-on toys and broken toilets-turned-flower-beds. Grandpa’s yard was pristine. Hibiscus, oleander, and elephant’s ears grew near a white stone bird bath. Porch swings swayed in the humid breeze.
The good die young. The not-so-good grow old in paradise.
Grandpa was waiting by the front door in a bright green and blue polka-dotted hat that declared, “It’s Party Time.” His face was clean-shaven, his posture stately despite the wheelchair. He wore a faded red button-up, grey suspenders, and a black pair of polyester dress pants. And, of course, he had his cowboy boots on.
“Well, lookee here, lookee here,” he said in his Southern Texas drawl. “Deary, you are lookin’ mighty fine.”
Grandpa’s grandchildren are all “Deary” to him. My cousins and I have discussed this at length, determining that it is easier than remembering our individual names.
“And so are you, Grandpa,” Audra lied, greeting him for both of us.
A vain man, Grandpa had never been overweight. But I guessed he’d lost several pounds, judging from the looks of his hollow, grey cheeks.
“That’s because I’m happy here,” he said. “Happy, happy, happy.”
A phrase he should have trademarked.
Oliver began to cry.
“My lands… That’s just the Cherokee blood in her coming out,” Grandpa said.
“Grandpa,” I said, “this is your great-grandson, Thomas Oliver Brewer.”
“Oh,” he beamed. “A Thomas, huh? That’s a fine name. You can’t go wrong with a Thomas.”
Thomas is Grandpa’s first name, just as it was my father’s first name. And mine. Giving it to Oliver had been Audra’s decision.
The nurses ushered us into the kitchen, where a large table had been covered with a red plastic table cloth. In the center, a white cake waited to be cut. A quote about the tree of life had been penned on it in black icing. A cheerful yellow covered the walls. Balloons floated from white ribbons, clinging to the windows and patio door as if they wanted to escape.
For the next two hours, we listened to him rewrite family history. Didn’t we know what a good Christian he was? Hadn’t we heard that he had given generously to those in need? Weren’t we aware that his was a happy life?
I promised myself I would never return to that nursing home that reeked of pina colada air freshener ever again.
But then my father got sick.
“Don’t deny a man his last dying wish,” Dad said with a smile. “He needs to see the beach again.”
Even if he hadn’t forced a promise out of me to visit Grandpa, Dad’s death meant that I was now required to act as Grandpa’s power of attorney. My first challenge in this new role was to find new hospice care for Grandpa. A mild case of the measles had given way to encephalitis. The virus had weakened his immune system and attacked his brain cells.
“I know it’s bad timing,” a nurse told me over the phone.
The timing could not have been worse. I had one week to burn until a group of shareholders would decide the fate of the company Dad and I built from the ground up. Instead of much needed prep time in the office, I found myself speeding down a Texas highway in a rental, reminding myself of all of the reasons my Dad should have hated Grandpa.
***
Born and raised on a Cherokee reservation, Grandpa’s ticket out was a construction job in the city. Most of what I know about him is secondhand, but all of it is interesting – even if it isn’t actually true.
I’ve heard that he was an automobile magazine collector, banking on a stranger’s word that they would be worth good money in fifty years. (They’re as worthless now as they were back then.)
I’ve heard that he used to spit in his chewing tobacco because it kept the other guys on the crew out of his can of chew.
That he never washed the handkerchief he always kept in his shirt pocket.
That he used to bury money in coffee cans in his backyard.
That he could cuss like a sailor and sing like an angel.
That he allowed several days to pass between baths.
I’ve also heard that he was handsome, which partly explains how my grandmother—a woman half his age—fell in love with him. But Grandpa was in love with gambling, alcohol, and chasing other women.
“He never could stay home,” Dad had admitted when I was old enough to wonder where he’d gone wrong.
Before he found Jesus and sobered up for good, my grandmother had been hospitalized five times. Three times for domestic abuse. And twice when she gave birth, to my aunt and then to my dad. Grandpa had also fathered an illegitimate child – an aunt I’ve never met. The weight of his guilt was a burden he soon grew weary of carrying. With Texas in his heart and Kansas in his rearview mirror, he set out to make a new life for himself.
A happy, happy, happy life.
I knew none of this as a child. I knew the man in worn Western shirts and scuffed cowboy boots. I knew he loved polka music and poodles and the blue Oldsmobile he drove from Texas to see me every Christmas. He stopped visiting when he was too old to drive, and then it was up to my parents to drive to Texas.
Instead, we mailed him our annual family Christmas picture. Dad called him every few weeks. In his absence, I grew curious about him.
I never heard Grandma speak about Grandpa. But I did ask her – only once – what he was like.
“He’s lost,” she said. “Some men never will find themselves.”
That was that. As though she was telling me how to boil eggs or spell an unusual word. Matter-of-fact, with no emotion whatsoever. So, I never asked her about him again.
As I grew older, Grandpa became “Grandpa Texas,” a larger-than-life name without a face. Grandpa Texas says hello. One of Grandpa Texas’s poodles died last week. Grandpa Texas started seeing his next door neighbor.
During college, Dad began to visit him, flying down for a weekend to take him to dinner and to the beach. I heard the occasional updates about him, but I began to tune them out. Grandpa Texas got lost in the shuffle between work, school, Audra, and our family—which I decided he’d ceased to be a part of the moment he’d first crossed that state line.
***
I didn’t see him again until my wedding day, which was nearly eight years ago.
“Where is your girl, Deary,” he asks me for the third time today.
“She stayed home with Oliver,” I repeat as patiently as I can, pulling in to the open parking space closest to the beach.
“Well, she sure is a dandy,” he says, patting my hand. I’m not sure if he’s referring to Audra, or to Oliver, as I’ve already had to remind him that Oliver is a boy.
I climb out and shut the door behind me. The waves audibly rush from the shoreline, a sound that reminds me of the way Audra breathes when she’s asleep. I can almost smell her perfume, feel her skin against mine… But she’s eight hours away. All I have is the salty air, the breeze from the beach, and Grandpa Texas in the front seat of my rented Chevy Malibu.
The nurses helped me get him into the front seat; it’s no small feat to get him out and into his wheelchair by myself.
“My lands! It is a beautiful day, isn’t it,” Grandpa says as I wheel him through the sand.
He takes in the young crowd playing Frisbee ahead of us as I watch his wheels make deep tracks behind him. I find a good place to stop and it occurs to me that I didn’t even think to bring a lawn chair with me. Silently, I will the cheap green and white ones collecting dust and spiders in our garage to come to me on this beach in Galveston, where they will find me standing awkwardly beside a half-stranger in a wheelchair.
“You want to know a fact about seagulls, Deary,” Grandpa asks.
“Sure,” I say, focusing on the group of them he’s been watching.
“When they’re hungry, they’ll stomp on the ground—in a circle—until earthworms come out.”
“Really?”
“Yes, Deary. I read that,” he says emphatically. “It is a learned behavior, passed on from generation to generation.”
That’s one thing I do remember about Grandpa—he likes to read, about anything and everything. Dad was the same way. I’m sure most of their beachside talks were like this, exchanging factual details they found interesting while watching waves and seagulls.
“I put in an application for another position,” Grandpa says.
I look at him, confused, but then I remember. He’s sick.
“You did?”
“It’ll be a lot of work on high beams, but I don’t mind it,” he says.
“You don’t,” I ask.
The nurses encouraged me to go along to keep from upsetting him, so that’s what I’m doing.
“It only takes one fall,” he says, holding up a crooked finger, “for your body to break apart into a million pieces.”
His jaw clenches visibly beneath his thin, grey skin.
“But that’s where I belong, you know. That’s where I’m happiest. Happy, happy, happy.”
“Of course,” I say, careful not to call him Grandpa, as I’m unsure of my own identity in the havoc of his virus-ridden brain.
I take in the variety of people on the beach around us—teenagers, families, retirees—and I wonder how we look to them.
A pale young man. Mid-thirties. In a blue polo and khakis. A husband. A father. A loyal man. Who keeps showing up, even when he doesn’t want to get out of bed.
Standing next to a frail ninety-something year old man with leathery skin who is wasting away to nothing, even as he sits in his wheelchair. Alone.
And suddenly I understand that this is what Dad wanted me to see.
Grandpa Texas isn’t a monster. And he isn’t larger than life.
He’s just a man.
A man who loves polka music and reads about seagulls. A man who’s tried all his life to outrun his transgressions. In a pair of cowboy boots.
“Where is your girl, Deary?”
“She stayed home with our son, Thomas Oliver,” I say with a smile.
“A Thomas,” Grandpa says, surprised. “That’s a fine name for a Brewer.”
“We thought so,” I agree.
“That’s wonderful, Deary,” Grandpa says. “That makes me happy. Happy, happy, happy.”
And for the first time in my life, I believe him. – ©️ 2021 Portia July
Portia July 