Skittles and Starburst

My grandpa Carver was the man who adopted my mother at four days old in the parking lot of the hospital. He died when I was seven. He had more influence on me than all the other grandparents put together.

I know very few stories of his young life, as he was an exceedingly proud man. The kind of man who didn’t believe that your past bears any relevance on your present and your future was completely your making. This may not be true, but it is how I see him. What I do know is that at very young age, my grandpa’s mother left him. Of course it was his father she was really leaving, but all the same I see it the way I can imagine grandpa seeing it. She may have been running away from her husband, but it was her children, my grandpa and his brother, that she left. His father remarried I’m not sure how long after. This is the woman who perpetrated more pain on my grandpa than anyone else in his life, maybe even his own mother. Now I don’t know a lot of stories about her, but I remember very clearly the feelings about her. The one story I know is that when she would invite people over to dinner at the house she would lock my grandpa in the barn so he wouldn’t embarrass her. She used to beat him, badly I think. And if you know anything about my grandfather’s generation you know that a man never hits a woman, no matter what she can do to him, he can’t raise a finger. She made my grandpa powerless, again and again, in a time when being a man meant being powerful.
I don’t really know how it plays into the drama, but I do know that my grandpa’s only brother, the only other person who survived this childhood, killed himself as an adult. Granted he had some more significant issues. It was almost never talked about, but my mother told me some years ago that grandpa’s brother never matured. She said that puberty and its blessings never came for him. He grew into adulthood with the same equipment he was born with. Given the little I know of his stepmother and mother and father, there was no chance for this man to come to terms with this illness. His manhood both physically and emotionally never had a chance. When he killed himself he left my grandpa alone, both with his childhood and with his family legacy.
Years pass, as they tend to, and grandpa, perhaps beginning the long line of those who survive, survived. He went to war, got married, had a daughter, and worked, a lot. Now I have seen many a story of the old guy sitting in his chair trying to get somebody to listen to his stories about what it was like to live through the Great War. This was not the case with grandpa. He never mentioned it, ever. I have no idea what he did, where he fought, what it was like. At his funeral I saw that he had some medals. Apparently he did something somewhere that deserved a medal. But he never told me.
I’m not sure when he married my grandmother or how they met. I never heard any story of a great love that lasted over time and space to bring them together after the war. I used to see pictures of them together when they were young. Him in his uniform and her feet below him in a blue dress. He was huge and she was so small. And that’s how I saw them. He was huge and she was so small. They were divorced long before I was born, and I remember as a child not even being able to connect them. I knew they had been married and that he was dad and she was mom to my mother, but I couldn’t see a connection. I don’t know if I had the child like vision, you know the way that they can see things that others can’t. But they were never intended to be together, I think. I want to know what it was that drew them together, what need they filled in each other for even the small amount of time they were together, but I suppose that will never happen.
Anyway, the two of them being unable to have children stood in a hospital parking lot and bought a baby. There was speculation as to whether he or she was the problem in the conception. My mother has eluded to the idea that it may have been him. What a great disappointment to man whom was made to feel small and unmanly since childhood. Under the circumstances I can see why it would be difficult for him to remain married to a woman who, for her own reasons, did not like to have sex. That just put too much weight on his already fragile masculinity, I think.
It’s almost funny for me to stand back from this analysis of my grandpa and hold this image at the same time as the image I remember of him. You see my grandpa was a gargantuan man in every sense to me. He was more than six and a half feet tall and well over three hundred pounds. He died when I was seven so I still remember that man as a seven-year-old. Before he retired he was a glazier. He put windows in buildings, and he loved his work. I always saw him in my mind on some huge latter holding enormous sheets of glass against the side of a building, stories above the sidewalk. He was the epitome of a manly man in my eyes. He was a champion bowler, and truth or not I believe the stories that he could bowl a three hundred any time. After his funeral we took his trophies and his bowling ball home with us. I couldn’t lift that ball, even with two hands, until well into my teen years.
Slim, that was my grandpa’s nickname, remarried when my mother was a teenager. His wife, Gloria, was a rather hardened woman by the time I met her. But apparently, despite all the problems that arose in the home, this was the most loving relationship, the happiest he ever got to be. But she and my mother never got along and Gloria’s three children brought their own baggage as did Gloria and her ex-husband. I am not sure there was a day in my grandpa’s life that wasn’t plagued by some familial drama, if not tragedy. He was always being pulled from one woman in his life to another, and they all pulled fiercely, some physically paining him and some emotionally tearing him.
He adored my mother, no matter how many times she disappointed him. In fact he adored every woman in his life. It is difficult to explain how a seven-year-old sees a grown man’s adoration, but it was so very evident. It wasn’t just that he loved his wife and daughter and two stepdaughters, he adored them separately, each for who they were. With each he was different man. He became a complement to them in his adoration of them. With my grandmother, who was stern, he was masculine and soft. He ate her green spaghetti. No one else would. He would laugh at her dramatics and he would touch her, almost imperceptibly, when he knew she was insecure about something. With my mother he was the perfect daddy. He bailed her out of every mistake. He saved her from every foe. When she came home from the army at 18, not even completing boot camp, and told him she was pregnant out of wedlock, he wouldn’t speak to her. Now I know to some people that sounds like a lack of support, but to me, I know that he was devastated that his baby girl had ruined her life. My mother might argue this point, but I think he couldn’t speak to her because he had always put her on a pedestal. She was perfect to him. And now he was faced with the very real image of my mother. He didn’t want to see it, not just yet. But when that baby, my sister, came along, my grandpa found a whole new level to his ability to adore.
My mother did not have a father to give my sister in the beginning, so my grandpa was her first and strongest daddy figure. I was always a little jealous of this. He was such a perfect daddy. And she had him first. There was something very special about the way they were together. I can remember the way she would look at him. I don’t think there are words enough to explain the way she looked at him. Before I and before my father, before either of us entered the picture, they had a life there in San Diego. Grandpa, and my mom and my sister. I don’t know where or how they lived or if they lived together or close. I never asked. I think I was afraid to find out that they had been happy before me. But even though, I picture them as happy.
Somewhere along this line my parents married and a year or so later I was born. This is where the story begins, my story, mine and grandpa’s.
My grandpa lived in a triple wide trailer on the top of a big hill or a small mountain, I’m not sure which. And all around this hill mountain was a canyon. We’re talking real wilderness. Even his driveway was a feat to mount, especially in the winter with the snow. My dad once had to drive the car up the road backwards because of the rear wheel drive could only make it up the drive that way. Grandpa had a tractor that he used to plow the drive. He let me ride with him. I have a picture of it. Him sitting in his plaid shirt on this enormous tractor, and my father and I perched up on the side of the machine. Small as we were in comparison to the machine the same we were to grandpa.
He would park the tractor in the shed. It wasn’t really a shed though. It was actually bigger than the house. But with a man like Grandpa, he had to have a place for all his tools. And he had tons. I remember walking through the shed just amazed by the array of blades and cords and things I can’t even describe except that they seemed to me to be the tools of all those burly men that are in the enchanted forests that save the princess when she gets lost. And that’s what I imagined my grandpa did in his spare time; he went trampsing through the forest looking for lost princesses to save. Well that would be in the time that was left over after picking blackberries from the driveway and making jam, and then of course after All My Children was over. He loved All My Children. I watched with him sometimes. I like to think that I acquired my fondness for television drama from him. We would sit in his lazy boy. I curled up in his arm. I have a picture of this too. He’s laid back with his feet up and I am lying in the crook of his arm barely stretching from palm to elbow. I look like an infant compared to him, but I wasn’t. I was about five.
He kept the neighborhood cats fed. Now imagine the neighborhood cats that lived in the canyon. I think he said he knew of about three hundred. Of course we didn’t have relationships with all of them. In fact the rest of us had relationships with almost none of them. There was Mama Smokey who was the mother of most of the canyon cats. She was grandpa’s cat. She would bring her newest litter to him. She’d let him pet her and the kittens. She tolerated the rest of us, barely. I could only pet her if grandpa was there petting her too. It always made me feel special sitting out on the front porch with these wild cats and my grandpa and I feeding them out of our hands. I was magical then. I could tame the wild animals then. As long as grandpa was there. Sometimes deer would come into the front yard and grandpa would watch them with this really satisfied smile. I imagined I could talk to them in my head. I think grandpa did.
He had one of those above ground pools, a circluar one. It had little white spider eggs all around the rim. They scared me and intrigued me. Grandpa would just pick them up. I always imagined all these spiders coming out of them onto his hand, but they never did.
There was this couple that lived on the other side of the canyon from grandpa and Gloria. They were Tip and Marcy. Tip was grandpa’s best friend. Whenever grandpa wanted to talk to Tip or if Tip wanted to talk to grandpa they would just go to the edge of the canyon and yell, “TIP.” And Tip would yell back, "YEAH SLIM?" I don’t think I ever saw grandpa use the phone. Guess he didn’t need one.
Tip and Marcy had two granddaughters, too. Both a little older than me. One of them was named Pebbles. I don’t remember the other, but who would if it wasn’t as interesting as Pebbles. She was cool, I remember. That last summer they came to stay with Tip and Marcy for a while at the same time that we were staying with grandpa. My mom and her boyfriend were living in a singlewide trailer at the park in town, but much of the time my sister and I were at Grandpa’s. We played hide and seek that summer with the girls from across the canyon. Now I was small for seven and the other girls were older than me. And grandpa being the hero that he was always helped me make up the difference when we played hide and seek. We would play in the house. Someone would go off and count and the other two girls would run off giggling to find the perfect hiding spot and I would just sort of stand there until they left. Then I would crook my neck way back and look up at grandpa and with a smile and a nod he would pick me up one handed and put me some where. And he was good. He never put my behind the door or the couch. No, uh uh. Grandpa put me in the dryer, or in the top cabinet in the kitchen that was so high Gloria didn’t put anything in it because she couldn’t reach it. And then he would just stand around waiting for the girls to come looking for me. He never gave me up, and they never found me. Eventually he would come to pull me out of whatever place he’d stuck me and we would laugh.
When we weren’t playing or swimming with Pebbles and her sister that summer, grandpa would take me and my sister in the big truck to town. We would go into the country grocery. I would sit in the cart and April would hang onto the side of it. We would go up and down the isles and we wouldn’t ask for anything. We had been taught by mom not to. But we would stare longingly at the sugary cereals and the candy isles. All the stuff mom never bought for us. He wouldn’t say anything he would just slow down in the candy isle. Getting slower and slower. April and I would be just about to pop in our silent hoping. And he would stop…right in front of the Starburst and Skittles. And I don’t mean the small bags. Nope he never skimped. He would reach out and get the big bag. One of each. He’d hand them straight to us. He would rip them open for us and let us eat them right there in the store. And none of this one piece for each hand nonsense that grandma did. No he would tell us we had to eat it all, all before we got home, so that Gloria wouldn’t know. And we did. We would all be sick and hands sticky and colored all over with a rainbow of fruit flavors. And so happy. We had that little secret, just the three of us. April and I talk about it every once in a while. And we still giggle like little girls.
As grandparents tend to, Grandpa and Gloria (who by the way we did always call grandma, though now it doesn’t feel right) went to bed early, real early, so that even I at seven was up later. April and I would watch tv and then go to bed in the room that we shared just off the dining room. And as grandparents tend to, Grandpa and Gloria would get up early. I remember waking every morning to the sound of shuffling cards. They would be up before dawn shuffling and playing gin or canasta or some such grown up game that I wouldn’t learn for many years, but have always associated with them even as I play them now. He did teach me to shuffle though. And he showed me the fancy way he did it with the bridge and all. Throughout my life when ever somebody has marveled at my shuffling skills, and yes there has been many a time, I tell them my grandpa taught me. When it came to actually playing cards, we all sat up late into the night, like 8 or 9, well past their bedtime and played Uno. I loved Uno. It was the one game we could all play where I wasn’t left behind from the start. Or maybe he just made it that way. Either way I was a part of it. I was a part of the tradition of playing cards with grandpa.
One night that summer, April and I were up watching TV and the grandparents had gone to bed quite some time before when we noticed a bird flying around inside the house. It was flying circles around the living room where we were. I remember the two of us sitting there debating whether or not to wake them up to tell them that there was a bird in the house. We let it go for quite sometime. Finally we figured we had to wake them for the poor bird’s sake. So we tip toed all the way across the house and squeaked into their bedroom. We woke grandpa as gently as we could and told him there was a bird in the living room. He rolled out of bed and wasn’t even upset. Gloria got up too and we all walked out to the living room and I was so excited. There was a bird in the house and it was late at night and he wasn’t mad. It was an adventure. And then grandpa turned to Gloria and told her to take us in the bedroom and close the door. She did it without asking questions and we did too. We went in our bed room and she left us there for a few minutes in which time we were mortified. What was going on? We didn’t know but we had very active imaginations and had seen way too many scary movies. Gloria rushed in a minute later and made sure that nothing followed her in and she kept patting her head. She told us. It wasn’t a bird. It was a bat. Yeah, a blood sucking bat was loose on us for lord knows how long until we got grandpa to save us from having our blood sucked out of our heads by the devil creature. Yeah I know in hindsight it probably wasn’t a vampire bat, but I told you about all the movies and I was seven how was I supposed to know. Anyway after thanking our lucky stars that it hadn’t struck at us with its deadly fangs we sat into our silent worrying about the archaic battle happening in the living room between man and fierce beast. We heard sounds for a while like swatting and a couple of finely chosen words from grandpa before we heard it. The toilet flushed. Seconds later grandpa opened the bedroom door and said it was OK to come out. What had happened? Well as was his way, he didn’t go into details. But the gist was he had caught the bat and flushed it down the toilet. I can’t tell you how freaked out I was every time I ever had to use that toilet again for the rest of my days. At night, I wouldn’t even go. I would hold it, painful as it may have been, for hours until daylight came and then I still peed with one cheek up and my head bent over looking to see if that darnn bat was going to come flying up out of the toilet and bite me on my butt. Why was it easier to go in the daylight? Well, the chances were much less that a night creature was going to revive itself from the dead and fly out of the toilet when it was daylight. Don’t you think?
At the end of the summer, my mom took us back to San Diego. Grandpa died not long after. My mother explained to me that he had gone to heaven. That he was up there right now putting the windows in my mansion in heaven and when it was done, he would be waiting there for me when I got there. That one thing may have been the single best thing my mother ever did for me.
I don’t remember what time of year it was, but I remember it was beautiful and sunny up on the mountain hill when we went back up there. Gloria and mom made April and I wear our old matching Easter dresses to the funeral. They were pink with ruffles. Really atrocious. I hadn’t ever been to a funeral before, but I knew you were supposed to wear black. What would grandpa think if we came to his funeral in frilly pink dresses? I was mortified. But of course I didn’t say anything. The service was outside and he was in an open casket. We sat in folding chairs in the grass in our ugly pink dresses and listened to the pastor talk. One of Gloria’s daughters was in the military and she helped fold the flag. She cried the whole time. I had never seen someone in a uniform cry before. Some how it made it feel…sadder. Gloria asked us if we wanted to go kiss him goodbye. I nearly died. I don’t know if I did. There is sort of a hole in my memory there, but I don’t think I did. It may have been the only time in my young life that I had exerted my will…by shaking my head violently and sitting down in a thump. Throughout the whole service I kept watching the bees fly around the casket. It was the strangest thing, but I was waiting for him to reach up with that hand folded on his chest and swipe them away. I mean I knew he was dead, but I just kept waiting.
Later that day when all the people came to the house and ate and talked in muted voices, I heard Gloria telling the story over and over again about driving up the driveway after work and finding him laying at the top with the bowl of berries turned over near by. He died suddenly she said, of a heart attack. Sometime later I heard my mother say to someone that he must have known. He had been eating a dozen eggs and a pound of bacon every day for breakfast forever. And he had just been to the doctor a few months before. He had to have known that his cholesterol was dangerously high. She said that he had gotten bored after retiring the year before and that now he had just given up. Now I don’t know if anyone pays attention to the way a child’s mind works, but when a young child hears that the man who loved her most and best in life had just given up on life, that he had nothing to live for, she . . .well, I . . .to me it meant that I wasn’t enough to keep him alive. That he had the choice and had chosen to leave me.
All I have of him now is this faded memory, an old work shirt of his that Gloria gave me to wear as a nightgown the night of the funeral, a battered old baseball cap that is all stretched out to the size of his head and Skittles and Starburst.
I cried over him just a couple of months ago, maybe for the first time. I was telling my therapist about how I knew what love was supposed to feel like. That I have this blurry fairytale picture of being loved with the kind of adoration he looked at me with. But the picture is so fuzzy. I told her, “I don’t have enough of him to make him real, and I need him to be real.”