A eulogy too late

I’ve never left flowers on my grandfather grave. In fact, I haven’t seen the plot, and I didn’t attend the funeral. I went to the wake, but I opted not to go to anything else. If it matters, he wasn’t even my biological grandfather.

At the wake I watched love turn ugly an already somber event. One of my cousins, who’d had her own troubles in life, wore jeans which drew the wrath of my aunt.

“its so disrespectful” she said. I wondered if my grandfather would have noticed.

I remembered the morning the call came in. My father, who’s never been a man for crisis woke me an hour prior to my normal routine. Half-conscious, I clamored for the phone thinking it was my alarm, thinking I was late and when I got there I answered the phone expecting the explode on my family for not waiting another 6 minutes.

“your grandfathers dead.” The line came through in a voice with a timbre that wondered what to do next.

“this is how you wake me up?”

“well what am I supposed to do Bren.”

“alright well let me call you back once I’ve showered.”

I was a man born for crisis. I over think things, I think too much, but when there isn’t time, and you just react, that’s where I shine. In times like this, I don’t feel much. I just end up thinking that you have to appear strong for everyone else. Someone needs to act rationally. Too much hemming and hawing might lead to some paltry disrespect of the man. Let the details be handled, let the other greave.

I went to Late Shakespeare that day and let Hamlet wash over me, but that was all I could take. I skipped German class and went home. I called my mother.

“whats going on?”

“well the wake is tomorrow”

“come get me, I’ll be there”

I told Erin I should get down there and see my grandmother soon. I thought I would ask, depending on her mood to see the tombstone.

I’m sure other people had planted flowers, I’m sure some had left wreaths, and prayed for his soul. I still never have, but for what my opinion counts; for whatever this counts, I think about him constantly.

There are plenty of men in my life, old guys that have come before me in the bloodline. None in my generation, but there are uncles, and my father. I even know a few great uncles for what their worth, and some of them I look up to. Some of them I should look up to, and some I wisely don’t. Still, I always think of my grandfather.

I would never tell the man this, I don’t know if he could handle it, but rarely do I think “what would my father do” in this situation.

My grandfather was a man of no great acclaim, he never stood high above the crowd, he never asked for very much, and it’s a crushing sadness to think that he could weather tremendous strife, never say a word, and complain even less. In that way, I think he shined brighter than anyone else I’ve come across not because of where he stood when things were going, but where everyone did when they weren’t.

To me, temperance is a gift I was not blessed with, but its one that I can’t take my eye off of. They say that God, whatever he is, works in mysterious ways. While I was not given a cool hand, I’m blessed to have an example to learn from, and in many ways I feel that its worked to my advantage to study and witness its virtue.

In all the words we never spoke to one another, in all the lost time I wouldn’t know what to do with if I could get it back, he’s still the most enduring and revitalizing figure I’ve come across. That he went back at 40 to get his high school diploma, that he worked three jobs to support a family, half of which he inherited. A man with no wants apparent to eye or ear, but one who would spin records on his head at the holidays and sing, a man who would draw Casper in condensation on his windshield from his morning coffee; A poor immigrant who had never seen the middle class, but would still ask “I wonder what the poor people are doing today” every holiday dinner.

Its easy to see this as a sentimental story. If we all just hold out, we’ll over come, right? I don’t really know, I never looked at that aspect. What mattered most to me, and one thing I heard the President-Elect say the other night was that he never got too high when things were good, and he never got too low when they were bad. He was reliable. If I were a novelist, I’d mention that across from their house was the Atlantic Ocean right there in the south end of New Bedford, and across from their house was a rock that jutted out from the surface, slightly crooked facing northeast ever since I was a child. He lived inside the flood gates, the ones that saved the city if there was a flood and the rising tide was closing in. His house would have been gone, but it never happened.

I’ve never thought of it that way, but that rock that had seen countless decades, a pack of seals and Frank Sinatra’s boat was the best way to explain him. It takes a lot of words to say I miss my grandfather, but that just wouldn’t do him justice. He was a gardener, he had passed it on to his children, and I can’t bother to water the spiderplants. And I’ve never left the easter lillys on his stone, but I think I’ll carry that rock with me, not just through life, but into the heart of my deepest lows, and times of suffocating solace, I’ll remember I could have it far worse, I could have it much graver, and I could always take it much better, survive smarter, and never say a word.

Ryan Seacrest is the enemy

When I was a young lad, I took up a paper route. It wasn't like your paper route, I would imagine. Placate me here for a second, I'm guessing yours was a neighborhood deal that you either wanted or your parents made you get to instill some responsibility. You knew your neighbors names and called them Mr. or Ms. [last name], you earned a little extra spending cash for the concession stand down by the ball field and every Christmas you got excited because most folks on the street would give you a little holiday money, because you'd been so helpful all year round. You were a fucking eagle scout.

If that's you, and I'm guessing it is because that was every ones route in my neighborhood when I was growing up, then we in fact did not have the same paper route.

See I got my paper route under the guise of responsibility when I was in the 7th grade, I was roughly 13 and despite having been on the payroll of the Catholic Church and my uncles landscaping business, I apparently still needed to learn the virtue of a hard day's work. Or in this case days, because my paper route was born out of my mother inability to handle money. She's screwed herself into debt to a considerable degree and this was her way of making some extra money. It was slave labor. We made $5 for three days of work. At least the church gave me $3 a game when I'd help out at CYO.

The route grew in number every month because we needed more and more money. (Once a financial moron, always a financial moron). We'd start Friday afternoon when school got out, and we drove to all the mailboxes. At its height the number of houses we were to stop at had peeked just over 1,000 and it encompassed 5 surrounding towns. My mother would drive, while the person riding shotgun would hang the papers on the hook or run them up to the door, and the person in the back, amidst a sea of folded and bagged newspapers would fold and stuff until we switched. Obviously, my mother always drove.

I should mention here that this wasn't the home town paper. This was the paper you got when you didn't get the hometown paper. It was a glorified tabloid that no one really wanted, so you'd have to ninja the paper to their property because if they caught you, they would undoubtedly cancel, and you'd be down revenue. As I mentioned above, we couldn't be down revenue.

This inevitably led to problems. During the winter months, papers might occasionally land in the snow in someone's front yard. Complaints erupted at the Gazette when spring rolled around and large swaths of suburbia discovered their own mini-compost pile sitting in their front yard when they ran it over with their lawn mower. Numbers dropped but we pressed on. For an entire year, we sucked down hot chocolates and suffered through Casey Kasums top 100. I've heard more Mariah Carey and Boys II Men than I would ever hope to again in my life.

Somewhere close to the 1 year mark we were fired. Well, my mother was fired we were sort of along for the ride. The people that finally chased us down were still being counted to save revenue, but the papers were mounting in our basement, until we were getting close to capacity and my father went ape shit. Instead my mother went to the little league field to dump a bunch of papers in their dumpster, but the privately owned field saw her do it and decided to give the gazette a call. Some would call it terminated, but my brother and I saw it as liberation. And in hindsight, I think I've discovered why he's never held a job for more than a month in his life.