Grandpa Was Our Glue

"Where I come from..."

That's how Grandpa always started his stories. When we heard those words, we would come running, abandoning whatever it was that we were doing just to hear him tell us about his childhood. We would gather in a circle at his feet and gaze up into his kind, smiling face. Or, if we were lucky, he would allow one or two of us to climb up into his great big lap and nestle in the crook of his arm, where we would lean against his chest and listen to the steady beat of his heart.

Grandpa was a great bear of a man, even as he grew older and his hair whitened and his face grew leathery and wrinkled. Everyone says that people shrink beneath the weight of age. Grandpa wasn't like that. His shoulders remained broad and strong from his years of hard work on the farm. He was tall, taller than a tree we used to think when were to too young to know any better. He had seen two World Wars, and had served in some way or another in both. He grew sad when he told us about those wars. He said he saw more men die than there were of us children, and we knew that that was a lot. But Grandpa was never sad for long. His mouth was made for smiling, Grandma told us, and he laughed quicker than he spoke. And when he laughed, we couldn't help ourselves laughing too. Grandpa was like that. His laughter and kindness spread like the flu, only they produced better results. He was quick with a joke, quicker with a one of his sayings (Grandpa's Proverbs, we called them), and three times as fast with a comforting word.

But our best times with Grandpa were when he told us stories. We never tired of those stories, even as we grew older. When he came at Christmas, our greatest present was a story he'd never told before. After a big Thanksgiving dinner, while Daddy loosened his belt and sat down to his afternoon nap, and Mama prepared tea with Grandma, we would run to Grandpa and beg him to tell us about his adventures on the Mississippi, or about his brother Ben and the time they'd caught twenty-five deer in one day (a story we were later told was greatly exaggerated.)

But then Grandpa died. So unexpectedly it actually knocked the air out of me when I heard. His heart just up and stopped working, Mama said. The Good Lord decided it was time for him to go, we were told. I cried for two weeks and didn't smile for three. When Grandpa was laid to rest in a gaping hole in the ground and dirt was piled on top of the box they'd put him in, I felt a little bit of my heart tear away and bury itself in the soil with Grandpa. I knew my brothers and sisters felt the same way.

After that, we seemed to grow up in the snap of a finger. We grew apart, us siblings. Grandpa was our glue. He was like the string that Mama tied around a chicken before she cooked it to keep the legs and wings in place. Grandpa kept us together. Grandpa's stories and laugh and smile were the lifeblood of our family, and we didn't realise how much we loved him until after he was gone.

Sandy left for college the year after Grandpa died. She went all the way to sunny California and never returned. We got letters from her every so often. She was enjoying college...she'd started dating a man named Hermon... she'd left Hermon for Jim... she was back with Hermon and they were getting married... she was pregnant. But she never came to see us and by and by, the letters stopped. I guess she just saw no reason to keep in touch with her family and that hurt like a beesting.

Kevin got big and strong and left to join the Army. He sent letters telling of his daring adventures overseas, of how he'd been promoted in his ranks, of how he'd killed ten men without drawing a weapon. But then he died and we were sent a telagram saying that he'd died a drunkard and we knew then that his story's weren't true. That hurt worse than a bee sting and I've never seen Mama so sad.

Emily and Cara both joined the circus as trapeze artists and I've never seen Daddy so angry. His face grew red when he heard and the way his veins popped out of his neck reminded me of a mountain range. He said that it was an "unprofessional profession and no respectable citizen should don a tight, figure-enhancing, stare-enticing outfit and swing their hips around while clutching a little bar and flying through the air like a couple of monkeys". But they didn't listen, and they must have become some pretty famous monkeys because I saw their names in the paper an awful lot along with pictures of them with their arms around each other and their painted faces twisted into white and blue grins.

Joan became a hippy. I guess there's not much I can say about that, nor much that I understand, except that she went on and on about things like, "being freed from the patriarchy," and "learning to love and forgetting to hate,' and such. She died of a drug overdose and Mama said that she was a victim of her time and Daddy said that "No, my daughter was no victim, but she was stupid enough to believe that freeing herself of all rules was the answer to her problems."

Brian turned to the Church, donned the robes of a priest, and took to preaching great, fiery sermons about Hell and all of the terrors therein. We'd been the best of friends when we were young, he and I. We didn't grow apart right away, but held each other tighter when the rest of the family did. When Brian took the clergy and married little Hilda Brown, he wrote to me everyday for two years. But then the babies started coming. First Jack, then Henry, who was followed in quick succession by seven other brothers and sisters. Brian took the "be fruitful and multiply" verse in the Bible very seriously, I guess. After awhile, Brian stopped writing. He was busy with the Church, with preparing his thunderous sermons, and with the children that kept rolling in.

Mama and Daddy stayed together even as the family broke apart and I admired their courage and their faithfulness to each other though "thick and thin'. When Mama died, so did Daddy, though he stayed alive physically for ten more, lonely years and when he finally breathed his last, their was a smile on his face and I knew he was thinking of Mama and how they would soon be together.

As for me, I grew up slower than my brothers and sisters. I watched them rise and fall, stepping lightly so as not to make their same mistakes. I was the youngest of my siblings by eight years and I got to see them grow up and fall away long before I had to make the same descisions. But when I did grow up, I decided I was going to be a writer. I never forgot Grandpa's stories, and how important they were to me, even when it seemed like my family did. So I decided to write stories of my own, and sell them, and pray that they made an impact on the little children I wrote them for. And whenever I wrote a new story, I would sit back and think of Grandpa and his smile as big as the sun and just as bright with tears in my eyes, and then I would lean forward, plant my aging fingers on the computer keys, and begin to write.

"Where I come from..."