namesake

Everyone is watching the VP debate right now but I don't have a TV and so instead I'm reading all the tweets and thinking about my grandfather.

We do this thing now where we Skype for half an hour each week, and I ask him about his life and record his answers. Later I'll transcribe all of these conversations, and later still I'll try to turn them into something that approximates even one iota of the grand, strange, epic life my grandfather has led. His story is the one that always lurks around the fringes of my authorial consciousness, my understanding of self. His is the lore I live with, the crib once struck by lightning, the coal mine, the piano in a church beside an ocean. He recently told me about the "call girl" in the small town in the interior of B.C. where he grew up. Not that he had personal knowledge of this, of course - it was all gossip and dirty imaginations. Still, hers is a story I'd like to know.

Today my grandfather and I talked about love. "You've been in love, so you know," he said, although it's hard to imagine that my experience bears any resemblance to his, to loving one woman from the age of 19 until she died, almost 50 years later, withered by dementia. "My love only grew," he said, this after telling me he'd had two girlfriends when he met my grandmother, two young girls waiting for him in different parts of the province, although he promised it was all very innocent, very tame. One of them remembered him years and years later, when, blindfolded at a reunion, she asked if she could hug the man before her, and upon putting her arms around him, cried out: "Oh, of course! It's Gene!"

"It's all changed," my grandfather said, not mournfully. He was musing on the nature of relationships, because I'd asked him how he could have dated my grandmother for so long, so chastely, biding his time before marriage. "It's all faster now, or slower maybe," he said, and both are true: that I can take someone to bed the night I meet them, that I can spend 8 years in a relationship without a ring. I'm guilty of romanticizing the past - I sometimes find myself longing for the days of the Renaissance - but there is something incredibly intoxicating about the simplicity that seemed to govern romance when my grandfather first met it. And yes, yes, I know, repressed sexuality and female disenfranchisement and blah blah blah, but my god, the ease of asking my parents to invite a nice boy to lunch, the one with the freshly pressed shirt and the clear tenor, the relative sanctuary of courtship and letters and Friday nights at the dance hall with a midnight curfew. His love only grew. His love only grew.

My grandfather made it back and forth down the hallway at the extended care facility on his walker in record time today, as his physical therapist urged him on. 22 minutes, he said, a personal best. It's such a sin, really, the way we live now, it's a sin, a sin, how careless we are. My grandfather is a giant, you see. That is what I know to be true.