Winter Thoughts

My grandfather passed at 6:12 pm this evening

Winter Thoughts.

When I was five, I wanted to teach caterpillars how to swim. I was with my grandparents (my mother’s parents) and my grandfather was enlisted to help me.

In hindsight, across the expanse of years, it was a horribly cruel thing to do to these creatures, and even though I know that my grandfather knew that it was, he went along with it because I showed an innocence and joy in my pursuit to teach caterpillars to swim. Now, I understand that some will see this as proof of their belief that I am a sociopath and always have been a sociopath, but this is not the case. I love swimming and I wanted everyone to love swimming. As part of this swimming project, my grandfather and I needed someone to help these creatures learn to swim. We used one of those toys that used baking soda to float a red and yellow scuba diving toy in order to show them that swimming was fun. I should have thought about the caterpillars needing scuba gear, but I was five and I had no access to the tools to fabricate little mouth pieces that would fit the lepidoptera’s mandibles.

Yeah, I also didn’t know that they breathed through their skin. Biology fail on my part at age five. Go back to the end of the Carter years and beat young me. I deserve it. Anyway, this gentle and smart man helped me massacre a colony of caterpillars in order to make me happy.

A couple of years later, he and my grandmother introduced me to golf, and while I do not play nearly as much as I used to, I still love the game. He taught me how to play as he was learning to play in his retirement and I remember playing with him at a pitch and put in Guilderland when I was thirteen. Yes, my grandparents were still cool enough to hang out with when I was thirteen. Four years later, my grandfather was the reason I went on a tour at Union College (DRH, Union, Class of ’44) and I fell in love with the school, the tradition, and the people. At Union, I made some of my best friends, and I learned an amazing amount of things, and if it wasn’t for him, I would have ended up in Northfield, MN, and I would have never met so many of these wonderful people (a good number of you are reading this) and my life would not have become what it has.

As I type this, my grandfather, the last of my grandparents, is asleep in a hospital bed not three feet from me, and he is dying. He may die before I have the time to finish this. I am not being morbid, or dramatic. I am being honest with myself. While we are all going to die someday, he is going to die very soon. And I will miss him. I am here tonight with him, watching him breathe, knowing that each one may be his last, because I have not been there as much as I should have been for the past couple of years. (This is not about me though, and I am not looking for validation or anything approaching that as I say what I am going to say.) For the past couple of years, especially the last three, I have been a shitty grandson, in addition to being a shitty human being (again, do not negate me on this, I am not putting this up for debate, I happen to know just how shitty I have been), and I feel guilty for this. Not that sitting with him will eliminate that guilt, but, he knows that I am here. He knows that I mean it when I tell him that I love him, and I hope that when he does pass, he knows that he impacted my life, and the lives of so many others.

I love you, Grandpa.

November 12, 2010
8:59 PM EST