Archives for June 2007

It is 366 days since I said goodbye to my grandfather. A year and a day. My life is so very different in so many ways. It is not a secret to say that I miss him. I do. We shared more than a surname. We spent so many hours together. There are endless stories that I could tell about him. My grandfather was a colorful man who lived life.

He lived. He loved. He was. And in many ways he still is.

Sometimes I pick up the phone and start to dial his number because I want to tell him about my day or ask him for his advice and then I remember that he is gone and I stop. To paraphrase Bogart in Casablanca I am sure that I look like a guy standing with a comical look on his face because his insides have been kicked out.

Grandpa wouldn’t appreciate all the fussing over him. He wouldn’t want me to feel badly about his having died. If I close my eyes I can see him smiling at me, a twinkle in those baby blues. That twinkle used to get him in trouble because you just couldn’t help but wonder what he had done. I am told that I have the same thing.

But this is my blog and my thoughts. I like sharing memories with my father about grandpa. It is nice to hear his memories but sometimes it is hard too because I see the pain in his eyes. At grandpa’s funeral my dad said that he had lost his hero and that is true. I know it is because my father is my hero too, so it makes sense to me.

Sometimes when I walk into my parent’s house I go looking for him. He spent the last few years of his life living in the room that I grew up in. Sometimes I close the door and just sit there, trying to catch a glimpse of him. Sometimes I think that I can smell his scent.

I have had a few dreams about him. I remember bits and pieces of them. He protected me from something, can’t really say what because I don’t remember. I just know that he did. I don’t if it was real or not because it makes me feel good.

What I know for certain is that as long as we don’t forget him he won’t ever really die. My son still looks at the pictures we took, four generations of the men of our family. He asks me to always tell him stories so that he won’t forget who he was.

It would be easy to write more, but I think that is enough for right now. Time never stops moving and much as we might to stop it we can’t. All we can do is live the best way we know how.

You can call it Jack Versus The Oleander. Located in a corner of my yard there is a large Oleander with shrubitude. For years now it has loomed menacingly over the yard, a threatening presence. The only thing that held it in check was its healthy fear of my shrub cutting skills.

Armed with a lopper I can do an enormous amount of damage, especially when provoked. For a while there was a standoff. The Oleander maintained its position but only because every so often the lopper and I would engage in a little chop-off round the perimeter. But I think that we both knew that one day it would come to blows.

Sometime last fall the old lopper gave it up the battle. It crapped out, bought the farm, met its maker. Yes, I know that I am going on about a yard tool, but sometimes a tool can be more than just a tool.

I couldn’t help but mourn the loss of the lopper. It took close to six months for me to go out and find a replacement. Koheleth said that for every thing there is a season and now is the season of the lopper.

Earlier this week I paid a visit to Home Depot with the intent to purchase a lopper and nothing more. Sadly the Depot Demons got a hold of my wallet and I was forced to purchase other items but that is a story for a different day. On this day I shall only speak of the lopper, the mighty lopper.

If I didn’t know better I would say that the Oleander shrank back in fear of the lopper for it knew that in my hands it was a mighty tool. And in a matter of a few hours that overgrown Oleander shrank in size. It went from being Big Plant On Campus to just a mere shrub again.

Ok, enough of this nonsense. Apparently this is what happens when I spend 1,987 hours doing yard work in the sun.