I don’t have many grandfather stories to tell. My memories are strung together, mostly from photographs that I’ve studied and home movies that play in my head like someone else’s memories and a handful of second-hand stories. My paternal grandfather had a swimming pool surrounded by cement that snagged the bottom of my swimsuit when I sat down to slide into the water. The backyard was full of people and I didn’t know anybody except my mom, so I doggy paddled toward her in my floaties and grabbed at the straps of her wet bathing suit. Everybody was nice, but I didn’t feel like talking. I shook my head whenever someone offered me a soda.
Later, Grampy had lake and a boat, Lulubelle. I slid cold, cooked peas on fishing hooks and panicked when I found that the pea had been replaced by a cold, scaly fish. He told me it was okay if I wanted to fish without the hooks so I sat on my knees on the dock and dropped peas one by one into the lake. I watched the sinking orbs glow neon green against the shallow, inky murk. Shadows of fish swam by and sucked up the peas with a kiss. My grandfather liked to drink Coca-Cola out of glass bottles. When he passed away, my dad brought home a couple of Grampy’s old cameras and tinkered with them in the basement. I wonder if my dad inherited his affinity for busy hands from his father.
I never met my maternal grandfather. I know him best through a photo taken at my parent’s wedding reception. He is smiling, maybe laughing. Not looking at the camera. He appears peaceful, cheerful, even tickled. There is something about the crinkle beside his left eye and the curve of his top lip against his teeth that resembles David Letterman. Until I was a teenager, I imagined my grandmother married to David Letterman, who lived in her town at the time. David Letterman drinking coffee at her kitchen table. David Letterman mowing her lawn. David Letterman eating M&M’s or Easter SweetTarts out of the candy dish in her family room. I wonder if David Letterman likes ketchup on his scrambled eggs, because my grandfather did.
So do I. But that’s all I really know. I am as familiar with the brassy finish on the frame around an old photograph as I am with the subject himself. Just looking at him in that picture makes me feel a little shy. I feel like a little girl in floaties in a backyard full of friendly strangers. Like I should look at my mom for permission to have a soda.
I’ve always been a little shy around men of a grandfatherly age, but a few have given me a sense of patriarchal comfort that I missed in my childhood. Scoobie, the camp handy man, proclaimed himself to be “old as dirt” and carried a toothbrush tucked in his sock. He drove up to camp every summer because he had time off from his primary job–school bus driver. If Scoobie had been behind the wheel of my school bus, I might have started walking to school. He terrified me. I could hardly look directly at him.
But every night at 10PM, Scoobie wheeled out the cereal carts and unlocked the milk cooler. I had listened to my counselors slip out of the cabin to get Scoobie Snacks every night for six summers. When I finally got my own blue staff shirt, I also got a surrogate grandfather. Scoobie adopted all of us and spoiled us with sugar cereal. He looked the other way while we poured chocolate milk over a mixture of Cookie Crisp and Cocoa Puffs. He sat by himself at a butcher block in the kitchen, his haggard back to our tables, either squinting at a newspaper or, more often, listening to opera with his eyes closed behind his enormous protective glasses. He hardly ever dozed off, and if he did, nobody bothered trying to break into the walk-in freezer. The man was practically deaf, but he had a sixth sense about those hidden Klondike Bars. So don’t even think about it. Just eat your Cookie Crisp. And have some Lucky Charms. The kids’ll have to eat Raisin Bran in the morning.
Last call came around 11. As we filed out the back door, ready for bed or ready for mischief, Scoobie shook the doormats out behind us, hollering a reminder to brush our teeth.
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