first draft of "Ode to Grandpa"

In my favorite memory of Grandpa, we’re in the garden outside the living room and the tv is on just inside the window, the jingle that opens the nightly news letting us know it’ll soon be time for dinner. Grandma is in the kitchen preparing something delicious. Her focus on the food plus the noise of the newscast prevent her from knowing what Grandpa’s up to. He’s shushing us as we giggle and reminding us not to tell Grandma as he does something she has strictly instructed him not to: he’s standing on his head, his tennis shoes reaching toward the rooftop as his socks slide down his calves. He loves standing on his head for us; loves entertaining us; loves the mischief of it too. In this memory, my cousin Alex and I are probably 10 and 11, but Grandpa seems too gleeful to really be the 68 years old that that would have made him.

During my childhood, he opened me up to numerous other joys. One summer, he made sure my brother and I learned to sail. Others, he dragged us around the fields of Little Compton in the wheelbarrow attached to his tractor or led us on walking expeditions right through the neighbors’ yards to teach us the best routes to the beach or the cove. Once he took me on a walk through Cambridge in the falling snow. He must’ve felt for this kid who grew up in the warm climate of Atlanta; he must’ve thought it important that I know the joy of licking snowflakes off my lips, the crunch of the stuff beneath my shoes. When in college there years later, I tried to find the route he had taken me on, but all I could remember was returning to the house a different way than we had departed—returning through the parking lot of the Quaker meeting house and being delighted—at this point it getting dark out and me becoming quite cold—to find our house just on the other side.

He also took me to visit colleges. When I had narrowed it down to Dartmouth and Harvard, he and my mother got in cahoots and bought me a plane ticket so I could visit both one more time. Before I flew he called to ask me what kind of sandwich I wanted for the drive to Hanover. I assumed he’d pick something up at Au Bon Pain on the way to the airport, but when he met me he was carrying a sandwich he’d made himself, and because he had found my request for no tomatoes or mayonnaise ridiculous—he felt the sandwich would be too dry—he’d included cucumbers, and to this day that’s my favorite way to complete a sandwich. From the airport we drove to Dartmouth, where he left me overnight, then returned the next day to bring me back to Cambridge and leave me in Harvard Yard.

My first year of college, I was grateful to have my grandparents just six blocks away. There were a lot of things I loved about college, but I was a thousand miles from home and definitely homesick. Sometimes Grandpa would call me and invite me over for lunch. While there one day, I cried a little, feeling lonely for home. That day he told me two things: first, that I should think of their house as home too, and second, that there was a garden in the center of a museum in Boston where you could eat lunch in the springtime and where he sometimes liked to take a book and read. I remember the excitement I felt the first time I went to that museum, the satisfaction of knowing that I was sharing one of his favorite things.

My grandparents have given me a lot of life’s most precious moments. Letting me come to Little Compton every summer and just be a kid, enjoying the beach and the yard and the books I’d pull from the bedroom shelves; taking me to Europe for my first time; letting me live in their house in Cambridge in the summers during college—being a second set of parents, really, and the kind with a bit of fairy dust between their fingers. I have recordings I made a few years ago of Grandpa telling me some of my favorite of his stories—because if anything made this man magical to me it was the combination of his storytelling abilities and his insatiable appetite for satisfying his curiosity through adventure and exploration. Oh the stories he told—from his childhood, about the day at age seven that he put his little sister in a wagon and trekked her across Milwaukee to his family’s new home; and from Los Alamos—about the bomb, sure, but also his attempt to sneak off the premises, driving down a cliff-side trail he felt certain had no security gate—until he hit an enormous boulder blocking the path, leaving no need for any security whatsoever down that way; and his delight in Grandma’s being reassigned to the high explosives unit for her safety; and the way it tickled him to tell me every time I asked about the way he first met Grandma, and how their first date went, and how awed he was by her intrepidness at the end of that day.

This was a man who accomplished a great deal in his career, who is known by many people outside his family for his work on the Manhattan Project, in Washington, and in multiple universities. But he was also a man who delighted in heading up a large family, in educating us—for he certainly wasn’t shy about sharing his viewpoints or his knowledge base—and also in nurturing and inspiring us. My grandfather was a man who lived every day exemplifying what it means to really dig in to life and give it good reason to make you grin ear to ear, and that lesson is one I take from his life with appreciation and glee.