Just a post

On Sunday, I got a phone message from my mother that my grandpa had died. I had been about to start dinner when I got the message, so I called my mom back and started chopping garlic for squash blossom soup.

Which kind of puts me in mind the character in The Stranger who laughs at his mother's funeral.

My grandpa was a man, and he was a part of my life. I never really knew him, but I knew stuff about him. When I was a child, he would growl at me and try to catch me whenever I passed his chair. I would shriek and run from him, and the truth is I didn't like it. I was afraid of him catching me, tickling me maybe, touching me: I just didn't want any part of it.

Sometimes they would babysit me. While my parents were gone, my grandparents would feed me cottage cheese and peaches. I spent most of this time with my grandma. I liked the magnets she collected, little indian girls carrying watercolor flowers. Once we made bread.

Memories loop and swirl and dive, I can't be sure what happened where. I remember a pink record player, but that must have been at a cousin's house. I remember my grandma watching General Hospital--that was quiet time, and I'd sit at her table and practice writing my alphabet.

They moved to Sedona; we drifted apart. There were phone calls sometimes, and Christmas cards. They flew out for my college graduation.

Several years ago, my grandma died, and my mom and I flew to Arizona to watch the airplane spread her ashes over the red Sedona rocks. More time. More distance.

I have always known things about my grandparents. I have known things. I grew up with the stories, and as I grew, the stories got more detailed.

So why would I care when, as an adult, the few communications I had with my Grandpa went awry? I didn't, not much. I had never really known him well after all.

The last time I saw him was when my daughter was two. He was visiting my mom's cousin in LA; we met there for lunch.

He was nice, civil, old-seeming. His new wife sat next to me on the couch, showed me some pictures of her horses. Then she said some unkind things about my mom, and I was shocked by her understanding of loyalty.

After that, I continued to send Christmas cards and pictures of my kids, but I had essentially written him off as just a man I once knew, but never well.

So when my mom called a few weeks ago and told me, "Bob had a heart attack," my only concern was for her. When she called me two days ago and told me he had died, I didn't feel much. It's like the joke where the woman tells her husband the cat's dead; I was already prepared.

Still. Shouldn't I feel something? Just a little nudge of something? I don't know.

So I am sitting here, trying to remember one nice thing, but I am coming up only with memories of dark wood, boring depressing conversations. And maybe the nicest thing was the way he growled at me from his chair, pretending to try to catch me, because certainly he did that with love. Did I feel it, just for one moment, as I darted past him laughing? Didn't I want, just a tiny bit, to be caught and held?