Today My Grandfather
There he gave his life
It's Richard's birthday today ( September 28, 1906)
He would be older than the century that held his life
Happy Birthday to a man that lived
A life so very difficult in East Tennessee
That it reminds me now of kids I teach in this world so far away from then.
Lacking the ability to introduce him
To his great grand kids I am
Introducing them to just these memories of mine that are fading.
He used to say to me "Give me some sugar."
Nuzzle your cheek and take your hand
To share the land he worked, you'd go for a happy walk talk in silence
Actually my Grandfather was quiet, but teaching always
Calm, like water in the palm
When we talked it mattered, life distilled
Grandpa survived in ways most don't even vaguely care or
Understand this day.
Growing, factory, butchering, canning, events of doing.
He'd get me real milk.
That's a secret we had, he knew I'd balk at the cow's taste
Suppose I just told him as a kid would it was yucky, truthful
A chick caught my interest when I was five
and a hen sought to kill me for it
Grandpa always penned them after that, remembering his grin.
I reminded him of his mother, he said
Who wed the man that shot his dad
His Dad who tried to stop that man from beating his dog senseless
His was the life of fire on the mountain
He worked at "the plant" in town all week
Had seven children that still survive
I recall us eating blueberries and cream
At an oiled red checkered tablecloth
In a kitchen with a wood burning stove
He didn't take to hand outs or others
Doing for him refusing indoor plumbing
Because it wasn't from his own efforts, but as a gift from his kin
We went up on Bald Mountain once, huge beautiful chunks of marble are on that site
He, uncle and my father, the men, dealt with a flat tire and no spare
Somehow in fury they aimed a great deal of anger womanward.
I saw that, the fierceness of those men
The rawness of the angers in a truly difficult situation
But you saw too the protectiveness, they accepted the job of hunters.
He wore shirts that I loved to put my nose in
My affinity for white shirts goes to this Grandpa
With the stiff starch it was simple inhaling love
Once I opened the big door of our faculty apartment to see a man
He was holding a few clothes on hangers
I yelled to my mom the laundry man was here
Grandpa laughed. He had actually
Boarded a bus to come see me at four
To come to be my playmate and we colored our pictures.
When I was nine he did that again, he seldom left his mountains that envelope and smother you
He came and took me downtown (on the buses I rode with my driver buddies)
We walked and I admired a pile of rings strewn in the window of Yagle's Jewelery
He said "Wait a minute." I really thought
He was going inside to perhaps use the restroom
Coming out he gave me the ring I admired.
He bought me that without a question. I was mortified.
I thought "My father is going to kill me."
He said "It'll be our secret."
It was a ruby ring, it was on my hand until my thirties.
It is still our secret because it was the most
Spontaneously kind thing I ever knew.
My grandpa is turning today to travel the sun again.
But he is many years gone from living it, felled by a stroke and cancer.
I missed the end of his life, my father taking this
The high price of divorce fell on the kids that got
Treated to my father's destructive lies.
It would have been impossible to reconcile my words into his pot there, so we were kept away.
I saw grandpa in his casket after four years of no contact, looking so small, frail and stonelike
Waiting the judgment he talked to me about
The elemental truth he knew was: living is harsh.
Judgment would be harsher still.
He wasn't gilting the lily on that.
He lay there as if in cloud of anger waiting it and I felt so lost to assuage this.
My grandfather was gone away to the rock froze ground he tilled
Harsh wind on a country hill where his men laid him that day in the freezing eternity of stone.
Unakite actually. Which is marbled with color and polished as a jewel, but just rock, rare. Like him.*
His kids went to be teachers, PHD's , be in service all, run factories
Hold positions in Kodak, be artists, nurses, nuclear plant specialists, mathematicians.
He birthed physicists, pharmacists, leaders and lovers. Workers.
In his children and their children and their children
Are the things that he , himself, did not get to do
Go to libraries, drive sedans, fly airplanes, chose upholstery.
He did not walk the golf courses of a luxury or line up his drive.
No, grandfather worked the land, fished, and kept the children
Alive so that all of us could have all that we have.
My grandfather sacrificed for his family
He read the Bible as his book, he looked hard at the lessons
He looked uniquely at the texts and from this extracted things he shared.
He told me that I was to treat others with respect.
He told me to look at actions, told me to be proud of my artistic talents.
He valued that he said.
Gifts. He spoke of gifts.
He considered me a gift. He considered children as our most precious
Treasures and he took time with his butterball my cousin
And all the kin he had owe him our lives,
My grandfather Richard's birthday is today
And I'm celebrating him in a place he did not know.
In the poem and land of a typing ethernet
A price of walless brain wave and emotional dysfunction
Far from his hands that knew well this land.
Happy Birthday Grandfather.
*The granodioritic gneiss unit crops out in a band trending northeast from the Tennessee-North Carolina state line through Sioux to the Nolichucky River. Historically, these rocks have been called the Cranberry Granite, Beech Granite, and unakite. Unakite is known for its bright pink, red, dark green and white to bluish gray colors. Collectors who often polish their specimens into attractive lapidary pieces seek samples of unakite.
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