Memoirs 2: Grandpas

Everyone, of course, actually has two sets of grandparents, and I, being first-born, was fortunate enough to have met all of mine. But things being as they are, men tend to die younger than women and marry women younger than they, and so grandfathers are typically lost very much earlier than grandmothers. In this I am no different from the average. I have very few solid memories of either of my grandfathers - if you were counting discrete memories, there would be about the same number of each. But my father's father, Grandpa Riedel, died when I was ten, my mother's, Grandpa Hans, when I was only three.

The names I knew them by reflect the difference. My mother's parents lived in Brooklyn, not so far from our family. I knew them well from birth. My father's parents lived in Milwaukee, a thousand miles and a world away from us in Brooklyn. It was rare indeed that we saw them and so there was little relationship between us. I always regretted that, because I wished there could have been a connection with them as I had with my mother's parents. But even had they lived closer, it probably would not have been.

I

I can count four discrete memories of Grandpa Riedel, all of them really memories of someone or something else. He was a background figure, somewhat distant, perhaps not overly interested in a child, though that might be unfair. Who knows what is in another's mind? But there was no relationship.

The first came when I was tiny. We traveled to Wisconsin for the wedding of my Uncle Marcus, Dad's second of three brothers. It is of Marc that I have the firmest memory on that occasion, one that sealed him as a "favorite person" in my memory even though I cannot recall seeing him again until I was an adult! He looked impressive from my small vantage point, well over six foot tall, towering above everyone else around. I was awestruck by his very presence.

And then he did something that made me his forever. I'm quite sure he has forgotten it - to an adult, it would be a trivial thing. But to me, so small, it was a magical moment. He bent down from his lofty heights and gave me something: a silver dollar. He presented it to me with a flair, as if it were a very special thing indeed, and my heart was won. I treasured the dollar for years after, and this memory for a lifetime. I, too, was special.

The second time was years later. By this time I was old enough to be in school, and to be rather impressed with myself. I have a picture of myself taken with a brand new box camera I had just gotten for Christmas, wearing a fedora I had been given for Easter Sunday. Wearing that hat made me important. We had traveled by car and stopped somewhere along the route at a petting zoo of some sort, just for a break in the trip. In the photo I am wearing my overcoat and fedora, standing in front of the zoo's outer fence with my little sister at my side, perhaps three years old herself.


The trip itself was terribly long and boring for children. We stayed in a motel one night in Ohio. Dad had to check the room to be sure it was free of bugs. It had a pay TV (no, we couldn't watch it) and a vibrating bed )no we couldn't turn it on.) I couldn't even imagine what a vibrating bed was! The water tasted vile. It was a relief to arrive finally in Milwaukee.

Again Grandpa himself was in the background somewhere. I do recall visiting the schools where he and my grandmother taught. There were several beautiful sunny days, in which we were sent out to play on a neat street of attractive houses in a row, with manicured front lawns and flower beds and with trees and grass lining the sidewalks. My memory has about it quite a picture book quality.

But I remember the trip most because it was on this vacation I met my cousins for the first time: Uncle Hubert's young family, Pam, Gail, and Aunt Rosemary at the time, Paula and Andrea not yet even gleams. The occasion gave me some curious new glimpses into psychology. Three incidences with them stand out.

At that age, I was determined to save the world with some new discovery as a famous medical researcher like Dr. Salk. I remember playing outside with my oldest cousin, Pam, who was little more than three to my seven. Few people would play "doctor" with me, but Pam agreed. We played somewhat secretively behind a tree. I didn't know very much about medicine, but I did know that doctors gave kids shots, the worst ones in the behind. Sometimes, I discovered, if you were persuasive enough, you could get people to do things they weren't supposed to - like drop trousers outdoors so a proper shot could be administered! But you do it behind a tree, where you won't get caught. I wonder what the neighbors thought of our game....

Uncle Hubert, I was told, did not like cats. He was a dog person. I had grown up with both cats and dogs, and could see no reason why anyone would not like cats. It was certainly a weird position to take. I determined to play a trick on him.

Somewhere along the way I had been given a Hershey Bar as a treat, I suppose to keep me busy and quiet in the car. In those days there were two layers of paper surrounding the candy: a white wrapper and a brown sleeve. I got an old newspaper, carefully tore strips to the thickness of candy, folded them into the wrapper, slid them into the sleeve just so. Ah, it was perfect! It looked brand new! I was certain he wouldn't be able to tell. I would give it to him, and get a great laugh when he opened it only to find newspaper to chew! The image in my mind delighted me. Excitedly, I went to find him, but he was not there.

"Aunt Rosie, Where is Uncle Hubie? I want to give him a present."

"He isn't here right now, but here, let me take it, I'll give it to him when he gets back." I was so disappointed, she served cookies and milk and I soon forgot it until the evening, when I remembered my trick. But where was the "candy?"

"Oh," exclaimed Rosemary, I put it in the frig to keep."

I was a little shocked she had done that and would have called it all off, but she brought it out and with a little effort, I persuaded Hubert to open it right then. I remember, not his, but Rosemary's exclamation of dismay when the newspaper strips fell out: "And I put it in the refrigerator!"

Adults could be human and make mistakes, and laugh about it. It was a good thing to learn.

The next day, I think it was, I came around the corner into the living room and found Uncle Hubert alone. He was sitting in a chair and leaning way over, and I could hear him saying "Here, Kitty, Kitty." He wasn't really a cat-hater after all! When I came fully in and he noticed me, he sat back up straight in his chair and refused to acknowledge the cat anymore; but I had caught him! People weren't always quite who they wanted you to think they were. And sometimes, they could really be better!

All this locked their family close to my heart also, and when in later years I was able to meet them again as a young adult there was no distance at all among us. It took so little to bind them to me. But of Grandpa, nothing at all.

Twice, as I recall, Dad's parents came to visit us before Grandpa passed away in the mid-fifties, both times while we were on summer vacation at our summer cottage in the Poconos. I cannot separate the two visits, and remember very little about them. They were probably busily helping my parents who hand-built the cottage themselves, summer by summer, room by room. But these were the only times I really saw Grandpa up close. I remember nothing he said, nor the sound of his voice; just that he was fairly short, looked very old and shriveled, and had a glass eye.

What a marvel that was! I had once seen false teeth in a jar by a bedside (perhaps of my other grandmother); but he put his eye in a a drinking glass at night! How unspeakably eerie it was to see this disembodied eyeball staring up out of a tumbler. I was already a fan of science fiction, having been led there by old Tom Swift books I had discovered in an old trunk in our basement one year. Between my overactive imagination and my medically-motivated curiosity, that was a fascination worth remembering. He did show it to me when I begged once. It was hollow and only about two thirds formed, open at the back as I remember. He wouldn't let me watch him put it in or take it out. When it was in, it sunk in too far, and the eyelids covered most of it, and there was always some discharge from the eye socket. He had lost his eye, I was told, while working under a car. A loose bolt had fallen into it, I was told, though not by him. My picture of the bolt falling and his eye popping out from the force was dramatic, if unrealistic. Sadly, that is my only real memory of him.

One morning much later, as I was getting ready for school, my Dad was sitting in the bathroom and called me to him.

"Bobby, I'm sorry to tell you that Grandpa Riedel died last night."

I knew immediately that I was supposed to feel grief for him. He was my grandfather. I thought I loved him, and I suppose I did, in an abstract sort of way, the way you love the poor in India, or a Saint Somebody-or-other who did something-you-don't-know-what. But I knew immediately I wouldn't be able to cry but if my Dad knew I wasn't all that sorry, he would be hurt because Grandpa was his father. I turned and went to my room to hide that I wasn't feeling overwhelmingly sad. Dad called after me, "Don't take it too hard, Bobby. He..."

I'm not sure what else Dad said. Probably that Grandpa had been old or sick or that after all, he was going to heaven. I was stricken by knowing that I didn't really know my Dad's Dad, that I wished I had known him. I grieved that I couldn't grieve for him, and I wished I could.

II

Although Grandpa Hans died in 1949, I but three and my sister only months old, my memories of him are much more vivid than those of my other grandfather. His face, even his voice are etched into my mind. My mother tells me that in her girlhood he was very strict, very practical, very stern. One light was all that needed to be lit. He could read his paper, Grandma do her sewing, and Mom her homework all under the same forty watt lamp. Her image of him seems so different from mine, so distant. Mom always recognized how unlike our experiences of her father are, and seemed wistful, perhaps even a little jealous that he was so different with me. I was the apple of his eye.

One time we were playing together on the floor. My favorite game with him (and with my Dad, too!) was for him to lie on the floor and let me stand on his feet, then lift me into the air, or hold me in his big hands up high, and pretend to drop me down. Over and over again, I could be happy doing that and rolling and tickling for hours. I must have about worn Grandpa out on the floor, but I recall being lifted high in the air, and then suddenly, as if the idea had occurred to him like a thunderbolt, he said "How would you like some green ice cream?"

"Yes!" I cried. It was my passion, something I can only remember getting at my grandparents'. I loved "green" ice cream above all other things on earth. (After all, "pistachio" is quite a mouthful for a three year old!)

I remember him leaping up from the floor, grabbing his fedora, and going out the door. I can't actually remember his coming back; but the image of the hat going on his head as he practically ran to the door, filled, perhaps, with my excitement, has never left me.

They lived in a second story walkup in Bayridge, where my mother had been born. Sometimes he would take me for walks in the neighborhood, where I saw things that had surprisingly long term effects. A neighbor lady across the street, I remember, perhaps a little ways away, had long very blonde hair. Completely captivated, I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world - well, not counting Mom, of course. Is it an accident that the love of my life is a girl with long blonde hair? Maybe not.

As we were walking one day, an older man came toward us across the street. He was wearing an ivy cap, like the newsboys wear in the old photos. I had never noticed one before. Suddenly the man stopped and spat into the street, something else I had never seen before. I tried it.

"Oh, no! Never spit in the street!"
"But that man did."
"He's just a street bum. You don't want to be like him. It's dirty."

The funny thing is, I had to search the internet to find the real name of that hat in order to write this memoir. For fifty-six years I have thought of it only as a "street-bum's hat."

Or if we weren’t roughhousing or walking or eating ice cream, we might sit on his small porch - "stoop" they call it in Brooklyn - and watch people and cars go by, or what was more exciting, the airplanes passing overhead. Sometimes it seemed I could hear their propellors roaring as they went about their incomprehensible business.

One beautiful warm sunny day, he took me outside especially to watch a great blimp go slowly by overhead. Blimps had already, by the late forties, become uncommon; perhaps I had never seen one before. Huge and silver it was; silent and stately it made its majestic way through white clouds and blue sky, all unknowingly becoming a symbol of peace, contentment, and freedom for a little boy watching, fascinated, in the arms of his Grandpa, far below.

All my life I have dreamt of sailing off to the horizon in a blimp. How I wish it could be...with Grandpa.