Little Cars

Our annual Branding, 1989.  Fifteen cowboys rounded up 250 head of Grandpa's free-range cattle, vaccinated, castrated, de-horned,  and branded them with his J-Lazy H hot iron.  Here my dad in the maroon sweatshirt runs the shoot, and Grandpa, putting away his can of chaw, looks towards the camera through his dark sunglasses.  

Long ago, two young kids had three babies during the greatest economic depression our country has ever known.  One of those kids, the middle boy, was Jearl, my grandfather.  The family moved to Washington as migrant workers in the thirties, and eventually settled on a twenty acre chunk of land in Granger, and farmed. 

Grandpa was a hard working farm kid, who fell pray to several accidents that brushed him up close to death.  He had been plowing a field when the tractor on an incline fell over on top of him.  He had been working with a horse when it spooked and kicked his mouth and nose in, leaving a horrible scar reminiscent of a hairlip.  Grandpa wasn't interested in school, but I know he took piano lessons at one point.  He was more interested in girls, parties, and making money.  He had a mysteriously dark complexion, one we know now stems from a Jewish heritage, but at the time his deep brown eyes and curly black hair turned the girls' heads. One such head turned at a dance one night, as Grandpa with his extraordinary two-step skills made a pretty young girl named Luster swoon.  They were soon married and had three babies of their own, the oldest, my father. 

But the story is not a happy one.  Grandpa was a hard man in desperate times.  He was raised to be tough and strong, and became jagged and abrasive.   Unlike Grandpa Jose who was embedded in a thriving Mexican culture and Catholic community, Grandpa Jearl was a loner, pushing away would-be friends, embarrassing to his family in most social situations, drunk, lewd, dangerous, careless.  

I grew up with him being quiet and scowling.  I'd hear him and his cowboy friends exchange jokes that didn't make sense to me, but I assumed (rightly) not to repeat them at school.   I thought he was rock solid.  Unbreakable.  Unfeeling.  Until I was sixteen when my grandma was slowly dying of cancer.  I saw him kneel beside her, the band of his Stetson hat imprinted in his hair, and softly wash the drool from her mouth.  And then he left the room angrily wiping at his eyes.  

Years later he quit drinking, and his first great grandchild was born, our Andres.  Although grandpa has been unapologetically racist, even around  my husband, he drove three hours the day when Andres was born, just to meet him.  He held Andres more, caressed him more, than he had ever done any of us.  I wondered who this man was.  He was still quiet, but the scowl had vanished.  He had softened.  And warmed.  

Tenderly, so carefully, adjusting Andres' cap the day after his birth.

He sat admiring him.   Long moments passed in silence, a reverie.  

Andres' first Christmas.  Grandpa gave him all sorts of toys, little cars and this Eyore.  

Grandpa gave Andres his first tractor ride at one. 

Grandpa came down for birthdays or Easter, or no reason at all.  He started to call me out of the blue to see how Andres was doing.  Every couple of weeks, he'd check on him.   Grandpa had not even talked to me more than five times in my entire life was now calling.  

"How's that boy doing?" he'd ask.  His voice was still gruff.  But it was the message that melted my heart.

After Raph was born, the phone calls grew more numerous.  Dad would bring him down to us as we were so locked down in our lives, our schedules, our stuff.  Grandpa would sit and watch them play, smiling at them.  Smiling!  And laughter would roll from his chest as the boys wrestled about on the floor, playing with the little cars that Grandpa was so careful to always have when he showed up for a visit.

Grandpa gently propping Raph up for a picture.

"How's them boys treating you?"  As I shared the stories of my children with Grandpa, about how mad I was about something or how they were driving me crazy, he'd just laugh.  Everything they did tickled him.  They overjoyed him.

When we found out he had cancer, it wasn't a surprise to us that he refused treatment.  Slowly he lost the things he's had around him all his life.  He sold off his horses.  He sold most his cattle, reserving twenty for beef.  He gave away his dogs, holding onto the last, a sweet Border Collie named Belle, as long as he could until even she had to go.  His energy to run a cattle farm was zapped.  And Dad did the best he could to make sure Grandpa was eating and sleeping, but Dad works full time, and runs the farm full time, and as Grandpa needed more intensive care, my Aunt Jodie, retired Air Force nurse, came from Spokane to stay after Grandpa had suffered several serious falls alone in the house.

Aunt Jodie brought him down to visit us on Saturday.  Shockingly, he was a shadow of the big, tough man I grew up with, a looming figure of a cowboy atop a partially-wild quarter horse surrounded by a gangle of border collies, his henchmen ready and eager to obey any command.  Saturday he was thin, brittle, shaking.  He leaned against a walker and needed three adults to help him move.  But he had brought cars for the boys.

"We had to stop at WalMart and get these little cars on the way down," Aunt Jodie said to me, watching as Grandpa carefully selected a car for each boy, then watched with a toothless smile as they feverishly ripped off the packaging and squealed with delight to have a new Hot Rod.  "It took all his energy to just get out of the car, but we had to get these cars."

I don't remember much of that visit, except the way he reached down to hug the boys goodbye.

"You listen to your mama, now, ye hear."

 I heard the farewell in his voice, in his message, and intercepted his meaning.  He meant it to be his parting words to them.

I'm not sure I'll ever know why he was so angry most of his life, or why his life was so hard.  He's softer now, but still amazingly tough. But I'm humbled at the dignity he demonstrates as he faces these days at the end.   He's showing me how, even as we draw up close to the last door, and place our fingers lightly on the knob, we are ever-growing, always-changing beings, right up to the final open.   And more importantly he's shown me how a redeeming love as big as the sun can nicely fit into a great-grandson's hand, driven around on the linoleum with great joy, crashing into shoes and dinosaurs with loud explosions, and laughed on from above.