Having just returned to this blog from a hiatus, I am a bit surprised to realize it’s been a little over two months since I’ve written anything.  There are some reasons for that, but I’ll write about that on another day.  Time hasn’t been abundant, and perhaps this has suffered as a result.

In any case, I’m stalling, I suppose, as the topic is a bit sensitive and I’m not sure where to begin…

I never knew my grandfather.

In qualifying that remark a little, I did know my maternal grandfather(s) but not my paternal one.  My mom’s parents divorced and both remarried, so technically I had a pair.  I just never met my Dad’s parents, who both passed away before I was born.  My “grandfather” growing up was really my mom’s stepdad, which is probably a different story for another day, as he was pretty cool as I’d imagine grandparents go.  Either way, both sets of remaining grandparents lived in other states by the time I was born, so we didn’t have a lot of direct exposure to them growing up beyond the visits to Arkansas or New Mexico/Arizona over time.

All this as a backdrop, I never had a chance to meet my Dad’s father and it’s something I’ve always regretted.  He, like the rest of my grandparents, came over on the boat from Italy (Genoa in his case) as a young man, made a life here, and set my father on the path of his life.  He fought in WWI, serving in France, was wounded on the battlefield, left for dead, rescued, lived to come home and see his son enlist in the Air Corps for WWII.  He was injured in a factory accident and lost part of his arm.  He was the father of two girls and a boy (my father), who was the youngest.  He lived to see six of his eight grandchildren (by my parents) born… and I don’t really know much about him at all.  The sum total of what I know is probably about what I just wrote above, and it’s like a list of hollow data points.  It certainly says some things about having courage and living through adversity and change, but some of that was really a sign of the times in which he lived and not much about who he was as a person, what he valued, how he made choices, and most importantly how he helped influence the man I ultimately came to know as my father.

Which brings me to my next point… my girls will never know their paternal grandfather either, and it is a very sad reality to bear.  Certainly they have a sense of some aspects of my father, and they know what he meant to me in the simple fact that they will go scrambling for a box of Kleenex when I begin to speak to them about him, but that’s not enough.  They should have had that chance to see and experience who he was, to ask him questions, understand what made him tick, his value system, and so forth.  My father was a very strong and sometimes very difficult person.  He had as much strength of character as anyone I think I’ve ever known.  He wasn’t afraid to disagree when matters of faith or his values were questioned, and he’d do so with the full force of his convictions.  He saw things in black and white.  In right and wrong.  He didn’t seem to accept the existence of grey.  He did, however, understand the concept of tolerance and living with other people’s different perspectives, he’d just let you know (if asked) that he didn’t agree.  He ran his own business, but his priority was his family.  He never seemed to aspire to be rich, just to have what he needed to provide for his kids.  He lived for Christmas, both in giving gifts to his kids, which he always handed out from under the tree, as well as going out as one of “Santa’s Elves” with the guys from St Vincent DePaul on their annual gift giving campaign to the needy.  He would always stop and hold the door for other people going into McDonald’s (or anyplace else for that matter).  He loved doing puzzles and we did many of them together.  The harder, the better, even if he was having a lazy day, waiting till the very end, and dropping in a couple pieces so he could say “he helped”, which was ok by me.

He didn’t come out to shoot baskets or play catch much, but when he did, you felt like the luckiest kid around.  When he shot baskets, he’d take a moment to point out his “follow through”, at which point he immediately broke down your mental game, and you couldn’t make anything in a game of horse from there.

He could be confident and reassuring, and yet ask you what you were thinking in a way that completely made you question your entire thought process.  He had the benefit of relative certainty in an uncertain world.  I have no idea how he arrived there, and I wish I had a chance to ask him about that.  He spent a lot of time worrying about some things, but seemingly less than he should’ve on others where he just made a quick judgment and moved ahead.  He never really seemed “unsure”, which is perplexing to say the least.

He never seemed to be lost, and you knew you could always pick up a phone, pretty much anywhere you happened to be, and if he didn’t already know where you were, he’d pick up a map (yes, in the days when they had a paper atlas) and find you a way to where you were going.  I honestly think the first day I ever worried about getting lost was the day after my father passed away… up until then, my only concern would be reaching him when I was (in those days, probably from a pay phone somewhere).  As a seemingly insignificant observation to reinforce that point, when I was younger, I always used to drive somewhere with at least a quarter in my pocket in case I got lost, so I could call my dad to help me figure out where to go… in a way both physical and emotional, when he left us, it occurred to me that from that point forward, I’d always have to find my way back on my own and there wasn’t anyone to call anymore.  It’s a hard reality to accept, but that also says a lot for who he was and the sense of safety he created for everyone who depended on him.  In fairness, I should note that his directions weren’t always easy to decipher, as he always seemed to know where you were and where you needed to go, but at times he forgot that they didn’t call Route 64 “64” anymore, and it’s “North Avenue” everywhere… that turn could be a little tricky when you weren’t looking at the right sign…

In any case, that last point is part of why I feel regret on both missing out on getting to know my grandfather, and why I miss the same for my girls.  Even people that mean the world to you are people… and it’s not right to idealize them to the point that our kids grow up with a faulty notion that their humanity isn’t “normal” and “ok”.  As much as I loved my father, he could be a very difficult person at times.  From a disciplinary standpoint, he was scary as hell and you didn’t want to hear him raise his voice.  Even though I don’t remember him ever being physically aggressive, just the anger he could summon in a short period of time to try and rein in whatever bad behavior he saw going on was quite a thing.  My siblings and I have often joked about how the simple act of him taking off his watch (because he didn’t want it to hurt you in the event that you were about to get spanked) was enough to stop whatever was going on in the room.  Sometimes he didn’t even say anything, but you just saw him take it off and… ok, maybe I don’t want to be doing or saying whatever I’m doing that much… In hindsight, it’s pretty darn funny the power he had without really doing anything.  I’ve known some parents with absolutely no influence over their children’s behavior.  That’s not a problem he had.  That being said, just when he’d given you a huge amount of grief for having put him in a stupid position to bail you out of something, he’d come through and shield you from the harm.  Regardless of whether he’d just complained about it, he’d take the bullet because he loved his children and he had his priorities in the right place.

Referring back to my grandfather, I don’t know ANY of these things about him.  How he was to deal with, how he behaved, what his “buttons” were, etc.  Somehow, I’d like to understand that linkage into my father and see how one influenced and related to the other.  My girls won’t have the benefit of seeing that interaction either, and it’s sad.  I try to tell them stories (good and not so good) to show them that balance of his humanity, because I don’t want them to grow up thinking or expecting that, as imperfect people, we aren’t worthy of love and respect.  As young women in the making, that’s an important lesson I feel very strongly about.  Idealism is wonderful, but not to the extent that we don’t accept ourselves for who we are, faults and limitations included. My father was an incredibly generous, charitable, and giving person, but he wasn’t perfect.  He had more courage than probably anyone I’ve ever known.  He was a very loving person who seemed oddly uncomfortable telling people he loved them.  He was strong in a way that created an incredible sense of safety around him, yet he was forceful or stubborn in ways that could be infuriating at times.  It was impossible to win an argument with him, and I honestly only remember him apologizing to me once in my life… not because he was only wrong once, but because I think he went so far off the reservation that time that even he couldn’t justify it to himself the next day.

With all these things said, there really is no happy way to package it all up and make it feel better or more fair.  It is what it is.  That loss and that regret is there.  In the case of my father, I’m trying to tell my girls what I can so they know more about him than just what they experience from me.  They have the benefit of my mom and their mom’s parents.  It’s on me to try and fill in what I can of the gap, though it will never be good enough to make up for such a powerful figure.

What’s most difficult in all this, I suppose, is the realization that perhaps the reason I spend time trying to explain myself, and my beliefs, values, and thought process to my girls is that I’m afraid one day the same will happen to them, and my grandchildren won’t have a chance to know me either… (a very difficult thing to write)… I don’t want them to have all the questions I have about their father, any more than my father before me.

As someone pointed out to me many years ago (and very correctly so), I spent a great number of years thinking I wanted to “grow up” to be the man my parents described to me as a kid.  What I actually want to be is a fraction of the man my father was.  That is still a work in progress, but at least I’m trying, faults and all, and hopefully he knows the respect and love that is still here that I’m working on it, for my daughters, and the grandchildren who someday deserve to be told a good story about where they came from.

On that note, and with a lot of emotion now having been poured out, just this thought: I never met my grandfather, but he must’ve been one hell of a man to have given me my father.  For that, I can always be thankful.  And for my Dad, a Happy Father’s Day, and all our love… wherever you are.  Please continue to watch over us… because we could never ask for a stronger guardian angel than the one we have… and if you can please look away from time-to-time while I’m still trying to do a slightly better job bringing up your granddaughters, I’d appreciate that too…

Love, your Son… Charles.

– CJG 06/15/2014