Grandpa
My grandfather, who I was named after, died when I was just a kid. My dad’s father, that is. My mom’s father (the Italian barber named Bruno…I swear) died long before I was born. Cancer. Like just about everyone else in my family who’s dead, except for my brother.
I don’t really remember a lot about him. I never knew him as a person, only as a figure of authority who gave me presents sometimes. I loved him, but I didn’t know him. I was far too young to appreciate and respect the wealth of his experience. I was far too spry to forgive the slowness of age. Too deep in the now to care about “olden times”, as I called them. I didn’t know how much he could teach me until about fifteen years too late.
Mostly I remember that my grandpa was huge. Tall and big bellied. He used to send me up to the corner store with a note to buy him cigarettes, back when it wasn’t a crime to send an eight year old to do such things. Benson & Hedges 100’s. I don’t know how I remember that, but I do. I’ve never smoked a B&H. It seems wrong somehow. I guess if I’d wanted, I could have skimmed a few smokes off grandpa’s stash without him noticing, but I never wanted to. I didn’t start smoking until I was 16 and wanted to impress the bad girls. It worked.
But I digress.
Grandpa could fix ANYthing. Granted, this was before computers, so anything was a lot more limited than it was today, but still, you have to appreciate the breadth of this talent. He was an immigrant from Ireland who moved furniture (or was it major appliances?) for living. He had 4 kids to feed, and they all went to private school, because if you lived in the Bronx back then and DIDN’T go to private school, well, you might as well not go to school at all. My grandparents ate a lot of meatless dinners and recycled a lot of stuff to pay for that.
Maybe that’s where the fixing things came in. When you live through the depression and have so little, what you have needs to last. It’s a skill that seems to have faded with every generation, and that kind of depresses me.
I’m fairly handy with tools. I can paint and spackle and hammer and screw. I can strip wires and run cable. I can rewire electrical outlets and install dimmer switches. I can hook up complicated electronic systems without the diagram and program a VCR. I can build anything Ikea throws at me.
But for all that. My father is FAR more capable around the house than I am. When I’m scared to cut a wire, I call him. When I don’t know which drill bit to use, I call him. When I overreach and break something, I call him.
And even that pales before grandpa. Grandpa just rolled over in his grave when I said “Ikea”. Need a new couch? Don’t throw the old one away. Call grandpa. He’ll strip it to the frame and recushion and reupholster the whole thing. When he’s done, it will be better than it was new. Need a new porch? Call grandpa. He’ll come over and build you one. Broken radio? Grandpa. TV shorted out? Grandpa. Peat & Johnny sawed a hole in the wall of their room and pulled out all the insulation so they could have a secret compartment to “put stuff”, and the wall is plaster and not drywall? Get grandpa up there to re-insulate, wire mesh and re-plaster it.
My uncle Joe got a little more of that talent than my dad, maybe because he was older, I dunno, but neither of them could match grandpa.
He also made doll houses. It many ways, I think that was his calling. They were so beautiful that it didn’t seem girlish to play with them, even though he only made them for his granddaughters. Maybe twice the size of a microwave oven, these things came up to your chin if you knelt in front of them. The fully tiled roof was on hinges, and one wall was open, giving you full access to the attic and all the rooms.
Grandpa had saved some material from all that furniture he re-upholstered for us. The couch in the dollhouse was the same material as the one in our living room, and just was beautiful. After the paint job, you couldn’t even tell that the legs of that chair were plastic pushpins, or that the table legs were matchsticks, toothpaste cap lampshades, etc. He cannibalized all sorts of household items to make these miniatures, and it was amazing. I don’t know where he got the tiny plumbing fixtures, but I’ll put money the tiny iron on the miniature ironing board was stolen from a monopoly set.
Every room had carpeting, some wall-to-wall and some only throws. The couch had little soft pillows on it, and the sink had faucets the size of a pen tip. There were stairs between levels and a full master bedroom, a kids’ room with bunk beds, and a modest guest room. The walls were all painted. The drawers on the stained dressers and desks really worked. If you cut a stack of papers the size of postage stamps, you could put them in the desk drawer.
There were wooden window frames with plastic glass, a fireplace that was painted to look like a fire was burning all the time, and a chimney you could follow up to the roof.
The dollhouse he gave my sister must have taken hundreds of hours to build. Kelly was very young then. She destroyed that house. It wasn’t malicious, she was just too young to understand how very precious it was. She wrote on the walls and broke the furniture and completely wrecked the fucking thing. I remember my mom bursting into tears when she saw it. Her heart just broke. She didn’t know how she would ever tell grandpa.
But she did, begging him for forgiveness on behalf of her daughter.
And grandpa? He said, “It’s a dollhouse. She’s SUPPOSED to play with it.”
Then he made her a new one. I swear it was even better. And by then, Kelly was old enough to know what she had. That house is still wrapped in plastic and stored on the platform in our parents’ garage. We could probably sell it. I bet it would fetch a pretty hefty price on eBay.
But no. One day, one of our kids, Kelly’s or mine, is going to play with that thing. Because that’s what it’s for.
In his will, grandpa left his two matching gold rings to me and my cousin (also named Peter). Grandma always said grandpa thought we were special, because we were his namesakes. It’s nice to have something that makes you special, when you’re a middle child like Peter and I were. That ring meant the world to me. The Hobbit had been my favorite book when I was a kid. I read it like 15 times. I used to pretend that the ring was magical, like Bilbo’s ring. I kept it on a chain, like Bilbo did, and slipped it on at times when I wanted to feel special.
And yeah, sometimes I pretended it could make me invisible. What do you want? I was like 10, and none of my friends would play “Hobbit” with me, because they were all illiterate philistines.
Grandpa also did calligraphy. Grandma gave me his calligraphy set when he died, because I was the artist of the family. I still have it somewhere, though the pens are hopelessly dried now. He used to practice by writing naughty limericks in flawless, beautiful script. You can imagine my shock when I found them amidst all the scraps of paper in the set. I showed them to my parents, and they laughed and laughed, and then got very sad.
It was a terrible loss to the world when grandpa died.