my pop-pop

Grandfathers

Like most of you I had two grandfathers.  There was my cool grandfather and my uncool grandfather.  Neither were near me for any major part of my childhood, one grandfather lived close during high school but other than that it was thousands of miles.  They were my grandfathers, so I guess I knew them, but one I knew a lot better and one not so much.

My moms dad was not very cool.  I did not know him very well.  His pants never touched his shoes, I don’t know if it was always like that but it was for as long as I could remember.  He would read the newspaper every day from beginning to end.  They called him Pop-Pop, but I never got comfortable with that so I just called him grandpa.  He wasn’t a big fan of noise and until I was twenty two that’s all I was really good at.

He was the older of my two grandfathers, he died at age eighty nine, my freshman year of college, it was track season and my mom told me not to come to the funeral.  His wife died when I was an infant, I’m told I am a lot like her and I’ve cried about never meeting her.

He lived in a giant house outside of Washington DC in the richest county in the United States, but he was never wealthy.  He ran a plumbing company, it lasted forever, my uncle took it over, then it just kind of closed one day and now it doesn’t exist anymore.  He wasn’t that much fun to talk to as a kid, he was so quiet and very serious.  He was just barely too young for WWI and just a little old for WWII.  There are three stories that sum him in my mind and paint the picture of the most important man in the life of the most important woman to me.  I wonder what my three stories would be.

The first story was how he ran the plumbing business, it was just a small town operation and he was the owner back when that meant something.  It was the fifties, sixties, seventies and on.  This was during the height of all things race, and Washington DC was not insulated from the havoc.  He used to hire black men to work for him, and he would go out of his way to make salaries known, because it was important to him that everybody knew he paid his black employees the same.

The second story is short and sweet.  My mothers kindergarten class was the first year they desegregated schools, she remembers it being stressful, she was five years old.  My grandfather, a white business owner who owned a large house and had three beautiful children, whose pants did not touch his shoes, would go into town and sit down to eat with his black friends.  They never got service.  I guess they call those sit ins.

The last story is my favorite.  I spent a month with him in India, he was helping to oversee a hospital being built.  We lived right on the site, the city had three million people in it and there were only five of us white folks, in the whole city.  This was when he was in his seventies.  

He had an acre of land and would mow it into his eighties with a push mower.  He always ate big macs and he was thin until the day he died.  He was once mowing the lawn and had a heart attack, he didn’t want to inconvenience anybody so he drove himself to the hospital.

On his deathbed, at eighty nine years old, he spoke his last words, “I have more work to do”.  I miss him really badly, he would be turning a hundred this year.  He mattered, and the blood that runs through my veins is from his, I hope I matter.  The last one on one conversation I had with him I got into a fight because I told him he was being hard headed.  He was, I’m sorry grandpa and thank you for being so damn hard headed and uncool.