When Grandpa Comes

When Grandpa Comes 

     When Grandpa comes to our house, he slips through the garage like a thief.  In our backyard he inspects our garden before he comes into our house.  With Grandpa, the weeds fly like fireworks popping on the Fourth of July.

     In Grandpa’s garden everything grows twice as big as in ours.  He has rows of  prickly raspberry bushes, sugar snap peas, and nubby carrots. He has hills of potatoes and a huge mound of rhubarb.  Daddy says Grandpa’s thumb is green as grass. 

  

     I hold Grandpa’s hand in mine and carefully inspect it.   Grandpa’s thumb is not green, I want to  protest.  To me it looks brown as the earth he’s been digging in.  His palm is rough and callused.

     He brings a brown-paper bag full of Vienna sausages, bananas, and cans of smelly sardines into the house.  He sets the bag on the kitchen counter and tells us to help ourselves.  (Some mornings, a bag just appears on our doorstep like magic.)  The top of the bag is crackled into a big twist.  

     Then Grandpa screws up his lips as he looks at our long scraggly hair hanging down.  “You should tie that horse’s mane out of your face with a shoe string,” he says.

     Grandpa has coins that jingle like music in his baggy pants pockets.  He pulls out a handful of change and fingers the nickels and dimes in his palm.  Then he divides all the money among us kids.  “Go put it in your savings banks.  Quick!” he says.  One morning, when we pile into the car for a day-trip, there is a white envelope full of change taped to the front window.  It says, “For my little pets.”

     Grandpa loves to nap on our front room rug.  “Come snuggle up by me and I’ll tell you a story about my little lambs,” he coaxes.  How can anyone sleep on the hard floor? I think.  Grandpa starts the story, but soon his voice slows down to a groggy mumble.  When he starts snoring, I wonder if I should stay or if I can slip away.  I want to play.       

     Grandpa wants to make us into good hard workers.  He loads us into his car this afternoon.  His car smells as dusty as a dirt road on a windy Idaho day.  We arrive at the alley behind my uncle’s house.  This fills us with surprise.  “Okay,” Grandpa says, getting out.  “We’re going to pick up rocks.”  My brother starts to protest.  Grandpa stops him quick.  “Now I don’t want to hear any belly-achin’.  Chop, chop!  Away you go!”

     Sometimes, Grandpa takes us for rides through farmland.  He sits behind a huge steering wheel in his car that looks almost as old as he is.  The back seat, where my sister and I sit, is covered with an old Indian blanket.  All of a sudden Grandpa points.  “Looky here,” he says, his voice like gravel in his throat.  “What’s that?”  The fields look as much alike to me as my next door neighbor’s twins.  “Peas?” I say hopefully.  “No!” he says in more than mock disgust.  “Those are potatoes!” 

    When we go to Grandpa’s house, Grandpa is often reading the newspaper or stacks of complicated looking stuff.  He points to today’s newspaper headline.  “What does this say?” he asks. Doesn’t Grandpa know I can’t read yet?  Finally he tells me the words and  I repeat them.  “Savvy?” he says.  I don’t understand, but I nod my head anyway.  Then Grandpa gives me one more chance to prove myself.  “Okay,” he says, “What’s three times three plus one? Quick!”

     One day, when Grandpa is out inspecting farms, he finds us a dog.  We take a trip out to the country and travel down long dusty roads.  Most of us sit in the back of the station wagon and bounce around.  A farming friend has a beautiful mixed breed who just had three puppies.

     We stop at a house surrounded with blooming cherry trees, right up next to a mountain.  The air smells sweet.  Green fields of potatoes stretch out to the west.  We take turns holding each squiggling, wiggling, yelping bundle of fur.  I like the small cream-colored pup named Shep.  My sister holds the one named Hoss.  In the end, my Dad says he thinks Hoss is the best one for our family, so we pile into the dusty  car and it seems as if we sail all the way home.  

     After dinner, we talk about giving the puppy a new name.  He is brownish red with a beautiful ruff of white fur down his chest.  Rover?   One ear sticks straight up in a point and the other lies down flat.  And when he jumps on my legs, his claws scratch my bare skin.

     I expect that I’ll see Grandpa twice as much with a new dog to train.  But something strange is going on.  Every day I expect to see Grandpa, he doesn’t come.  Soon it’s been three long weeks.  I’m feeling as lonesome as a coyote scared off by Grandpa’s old hunting rifles.   I ask Mama to make Grandpa’s favorite dish for Sunday dinner—mashed potatoes and gravy—but he doesn’t come. When we go to a family reunion at my cousin’s ranch, only Grandma rides with us.

     “What’s the matter with Grandpa?” I whisper, my head cuddled close to my mother’s shoulder as we speed through the darkness.  “Why didn’t he come?”

     Mama hesitates, then speaks softly.  “I haven’t told you about it before,” Mama says slowly.  “Grandpa is ill again.”  

     “Sick?” I ask.  Grandpa is never sick.

     Mama hesitates.  “It’s hard to explain,” she says,  “The doctors call it depression.” 

     I tug on Mama’s arm when she stops. “What does it mean?”

     She sighs. “I want to say it’s like a sadness that never goes away.  But it’s more than that.  He’s had this problem from time to time, all his life.”

     “Is that why Grandpa never smiles in family pictures?” I ask. “Can’t we help him?”

     “I don’t know,” says Mama.

     If Grandpa won’t come to our house, I’ll go to visit him.  I sing him a song I learned in Sunday school:  The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.   Grandpa herded sheep once when he was younger.  When I finish, there are tears in his eyes.

     I don’t understand what is wrong and I don’t know how to help him.   I only know that I love him and don’t want him to cry.  I sidle up to him and shyly put my arms around his neck. When I put my cheek next to his, stubble scratches my skin.  His whiskers are both black and white—pepper and salt—as if they can’t decide if he’s young or old.  He holds me tight, then whispers, “You be good” as he gently puts me down.

     Grandpa refuses to go to a doctor.  “They can’t help me,” he says. He won’t listen to my Daddy.  “This is a cross I have to bear,” he says sadly.  “But don’t you worry,” he says, patting my back.

     Every night I ask God to make Grandpa well.  Each day I wait to see what God will do.  

     Now Grandpa has cataracts on his eyes.   He is almost blind.  Daddy takes Grandpa many miles to an eye specialist who takes the cataracts off Grandpa’s eyes.   While at the hospital, Grandpa finally agrees to try a new medicine for depression.

     I wait what seems like a long time for Grandpa to come home again.  Will he be well again? I wonder, as I race down to his house.  When I walk though the door, I can see right away that something has changed.  There is something different about Grandpa’s face.  

     Grandma is sitting at a new organ Grandpa has bought her.  When she gets up to close the door, Grandpa puts a record on the old record-player.  Then he stretches his arms out to me, and I run to stand on his feet.  When Let Me Call You Sweetheart starts up, Grandpa begins to two-step me around the room.  I hold onto his belt buckle so I won’t slip off his feet.   When I tumble to the floor, I look up and Grandpa is smiling.  

     The light has come back into Grandpa’s eyes.  

©Elaine C. Koontz, January 2001