I lived in fear of my grandfather for much of my young life. He always threatened to shave my face and would chase me around the house with his old man shaving brush, lathering up my face and waving a razor at me, laughing his gruff, mischievous belly laugh, his boots tromping and creaking on the wooden floor boards in their old house. He'd also do this thing where he'd grab my or Amanda's ear and twist it between his knuckles until we yelped and started to cry. Grandma would say, "Ted, quit teasing those girls!" and he would wink at us and we couldn't help but feel part of some great secret.
He liked to give us hell in the house, but out at his garage, we became his compadres. We'd watch the gopher sunning with an ornery, distasteful look on his mouth and we knew there would never be an animal more comfortable than this one in Grandpa's company. Gramps would let us watch him tinker with his old engine parts--grease on his knuckles, between his fingers, on his boots and thick dark jacket, grease in the hair he combed back periodically with his hands. He always made someone cry at Thanksgiving and he always complained the blessing I was asked to give every year ran on too long.
When I was in Japan, my Grandpa got sick and no one wanted to tell me. They didn't want me to take my mind off of the work I was doing. My mom and my grandma wrote me faithfully every week--they seriously never missed a single week and I never missed writing them either. When I was living in Kasai and writing emails home from Hiroo, where the Tokyo LDS temple is located, I started writing about my grandpa a lot in my letters home and my grandma and mom decided that I must have somehow felt my grandpa's pain and that I needed to be told what was happening. They told me he had been hospitalized and could be on his way out. None of us believed it, really, and we were right; he wouldn't pass away for another two years. Still, when I walked back out into the muggy air thick with cicada whirrings and fumes from inner-city Tokyo traffic, I surprised myself with how close I felt to that small plot of land in South Jordan, Utah, where all the huge Caterpillar equipment sleeps like a cemetery of old working boys who are only too content to watch the same sunset over rugged brown mountains again and again as their yellow paint slowly chips and fades to red, then black, until the rust finally breaks through, rotting swiss cheese holes into their flanks and joints.
When I came home, Grandpa was thinner, but he was as cantankerous and rough as always. He started to tell us kids that he loved us when no one was listening. Then he'd ask me when I was going to get around to graduating high school, not because he was senile, but because he liked being a jackass. He gave really good hugs in those days. Big, burly, heavy hugs from huge arms that engulfed your head because he was so tall, with hands like rough burlap pillows and an impenetrable chest that smelled of exhaust, Old Spice, and dirt. He cried at my farewell and again at my homecoming.
Grandpa died when I was on the trail, eating salted lentils on Cherry Creek with a band of sinagua men (the boys older than 18) giggling with ridiculous joy about having running creek water at long last. We had found water pockets earlier that week that were hidden in the thick shade of dirty, angrily plush junipers, keeping the water freezing cold and delicious even in the middle of the hottest Arizona August summer in years. The summer of 2005. I couldn't drink enough of that water and would lie by a tiny trickling fall of water from one pocket into the next, watching the columbine flowers tip a little from the canyon breezes.
Amanda and I both had to speak at Grandpa's funeral because there weren't enough old family members to take up all the time. His hands were too small. Everyone commented on his hands. That was the first time I cried for his death. I had been sad, but I hadn't cried. My sister cried, too, which surprised us all. I've seen her cry only twice in our adult lives. She grabbed me and hugged me. All the people that had shuffled through the viewing line were gone and it was just my immediate family left in the room with Grandpa. I held my sister and felt like I was eight-years-old again and her protector and favorite ally. I wept for all of that. My little brother Will pulled us both into his arms because he is bigger than us now and would fight ravenous wolves for his sisters. My mom joined the ranks and held us, too, I think fulfilling a need for hugging all of her children at once that she silently carries more often than we realize. Dad was huge, tall, shifty and awkward and stood next to us until we grabbed his waist and pulled him in. We cried until we laughed and then one of us asked if it was the first Gilliland family hug. Another of us replied affirmatively.
Uncle Vern pulled me aside after the funeral and told me with wet eyes that when Grandma had found his wallet after Grandpa had been sent to the mortuary already, she opened it up and only found two pictures inside of it (no one had been allowed near that wallet when Grandpa had been alive). One picture was of Vern, the other was one of my little kid pictures. Vern squeezed my shoulder in that kind of vice grip that men who live their lives on construction equipment under the sun with other men give each other to signify confidences or mutual understandings. I decided to assume at that time that Grandpa only carried those pictures with him out of convenience--someone had given him those pictures while his wallet was already open and he promptly forgot they were there once he placed the wallet back into his pocket.
It is only tonight I am wondering if Grandpa might have only understood me better than I understand myself, had sensed a kind of kindredness we share in isolation, in quiet, clammy hiding places because we can't find anyone who completely agrees with our shifty moods and understands our somber, lonely thoughts. I want to be a wife and a mother, a damn good wife and a mother, but even in Japan, even on the trail, I found myself caving up at times, wandering just past the hedge with the prickliest, thickest flowers to creep behind and tinker with whatever would keep my mind off my own incapacity to connect with those whom I am meant to connect with.
"I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately." Does one really have to be so lonely to be honest, genuine, deliberate? Am I really so selfish and angsty that I can live my blessed, plush and moderately successful life with such jitters and petty fears? How is it that I can carry so many blood brothers with me, yet find myself unable to live in close quarters with any of them without clapping up like a shellfish and taking long walks around dark neighborhoods in moody, passive silence?
Perhaps I should start bribing the groundhogs with rich salad materials.
Or perhaps I'll just snap out of this tomorrow and be back to my normal happy self. Maybe I'll take a trip to visit the fam. Tackle this business of clamming up a different day.
