Grandfather

He carefully skimmed his bludgeon like hands from bow to stern and back. His hands were hardened utensils spotted with calluses acquired from blue-collar days in his youth. Periodically, his sun stained forehead would shoot up and his eyes would dance in my direction as a reminder to pay careful attention. I watched the piercing white disks of his glasses but never dared to make eye contact with him when he was working. He stopped, blew the dust off the deck in one mighty breath and asked, “Now’d you get all that” in a Marine man's voice?

I replied with a jolly, “yes Grandpa” as I dangled my feet over the edge of his overused workbench. After all, I couldn’t count how many times I had heard that phrase in my short seven years.

And no sooner was he back at work, wrestling with the mast. He was a master craftsman. Though you would never know by watching him work. He did not use fancy power-tools and metal braces because they were “too convenient” for him. Instead, he used antiquated tools given to him by his father, and his father’s father. “The struggle gives it’oll character” he used to proclaim.

There was a sense of chaos when he turned his head down to work, a battle for control between him and the piece. At times it was almost violent, his cumbersome hands worked slowly while his arthritic fingers tried to keep up.

I had seen him build so many things that this days project was nothing new. Last time it was a heavy rocking chair, this time a boat.

Again, he took one mighty breath and blew the deck clear of a thousand curled up woodcarvings. The two white disks turned in my directions and his crooked legs lifted him from his wooden stool. He then hobbled across the sloped basement to his father’s craftsmen toolbox. He had broken his hip years back on the basketball court while trying to shoot a fade away. His strides were uneven, the right longer then the left. As he put the last of his chisels away he took off his glasses turned to me and said “how ‘bout some grilled cheese, muscle man?” He was a different person when he removed his scuffed spectacles.

I marched up the basement stairs across the garage and into a warm kitchen. He followed behind me taking the stairs one by one being careful to rest on each step. By the time he entered the kitchen I was already waiting, fork in hand.

As he untwisted the loaf of bread he began to talk to me. However, he didn’t speak of the normal topics like grandma or school or even the lake. Instead, he began to speak about responsibility.

In a stern voice he lectured, “when it comes time to work you just gotta work. Put all o’ the distractions aside, sit down and crank it out. This is something I want you to hear now. Be a ma…”

He threw a couple pieces of Velveeta on two of the crust-less bread slices, sandwiched them together and put them in the oven. His warped fingers turned the dial to ‘broil’ and then he sat down across from me and continued on talking.

I paid a different kind of attention than I did in the workshop; this was genuine interest. I sat up in my chair straight as a board reading his chapped lips. I took each word to heart realizing that the lesson he was giving me now was the one that he had been giving me all along.

He was not much of a talker, more of a doer, as he would proudly tell you himself. What he was doing now was more concluding his years of teaching me. “You’ve got to the point where you are your own man now and I want to see you take care of yourself and your mother. When it comes time to work, sit ‘own and knock it out. You hear me?”

I replied with a serious, “Yes Grandpa.”

“Now how ‘bout some grilled cheese champ” he hollered as he lifted himself from the chair and shuffled toward the oven.

Like a tornado, the conversation had left just as rapidly as it had come. The conversation’s effect was not necessarily penetrating at all, it simply capsulated something much bigger and more penetrating. In fact, no day my grandfather and I shared was particularly profound. His message was slow and took place in benign days in the workshop.