I left work around 3 p.m. and started trucking down 45. I'd texted my dad about my plans and he'd told me to call my grandmother and tell her that I was coming. Being the neurotic that I am, I opted to put this off until I was 90 miles outside of Houston. I'd been feeling bad lately because I'd forgotten to call my grandmother on her birthday or to thank her for my Valentine's Day card, a call to announce an unexpected visit seemed like a distinctly selfish use of Alexander Graham Bell's invention. (I know this is a contested history fact).
I called her from a Buc-ees while being fleeced for gas to the tune of $3.30 and told her that I'd be stopping by.
She was excited at first, but asked for confirmation that I was coming that night and not on Friday. I reaffirmed the schedule and she paused momentarily and said, "Oh, I wish I had known."
This stutter only deepened my antagonistic relationship with the telephone.
She continued, "Our lawyer is coming over tonight to work on our will. He's supposed to be here at seven."
I mumbled and stumbled a bit. Granny asked if I was going to be here any other time that weekend. More mumbling and stumbling ensued and I finally just offered to swing by for a few minutes and say hello. Granny said she would like that, but cautioned that it was going to be "one of those nights."
I should mention here that my grandfather was in the hospital last week. He's getting older and his heart isn't in great shape. He appears to be better now, but both my and the lawyer's visit were being conducted under the shadow of that event.
I didn't really know what the proper course of action would be. I didn't know if I would be intruding on something I wasn't meant to privy to. It was, after all, a discussion of both mortality and finances, two things that Gregorys don't discuss and rarely have any reason to discuss. My girlfriend is always mesmerized by this. It's baffling to her that I've made it 24 years so far without any truly significant losses in my life. This is, obviously, a blessing, but it's one that I know will not last forever.
Mostly, I thought about how much I didn't know about my grandparents. I had only the vaguest notion of their life before I came into this world, and I'd never really bothered to ask about it because I just assumed that there would always be time for that. I figured that I had better try to learn what I could that night, assuming the atmosphere wasn't too bleak.
I drove on. I tried to take my time traversing those 90 miles, in hopes that the visit with the lawyer would be perfunctory and maybe he'd be gone by the time I arrived, but that wasn't the case.
I pulled up in front of their house and saw his truck in the driveway. I peered into the kitchen window and saw the three of them seated around the table, with the lawyer scribbling on the yellow pad named for his profession.
After a short game of who's on first with the front and back doorbells, the lawyer, my dad's friend Dean, let me in and I sat with them at the table.
This appeared to be uncomfortable for everyone but my Paw Paw. Dean tried to make small talk with me, I tried to small talk back, but was mostly interested in talking to my grandparents. Granny just kind of sat in her chair.
My natural disinclination toward idle talk eventually turned the conversation into one between Paw Paw and Dean, and I joined Granny in kind of sitting in my chair.
Paw Paw talked a bit about his health and ran through a litany of doctors that he had visited, adding in little backstories about why he liked or didn't like them. I couldn't tell you the name of any doctor that I had ever visited, but Paw Paw was running through them like he was discussing the merits of different quarterbacks. It seems that doctors are the fantasy football players of the elderly.
Conversation eventually turned toward my trip and Paw Paw's eyes lit up when he heard I was going to New Orleans. He started grinning and laughing, talking about how he used to visit with friends.
He told me a story about when he and Granny went with another couple and walked down Bourbon, popping into a bar with people dressed in drag.
"There were men dressed like women and women dressed like men in there. My friend looked in and couldn't believe what he was seeing. Then his wife wouldn't look - she just covered her eyes," he said.
Then he laughed and Granny interjected, "She'd led a very sheltered life."
(I don't know how often Granny encountered drag performers in East Bernard, but apparently it was often enough to elevate her worldliness above this other poor woman's.)
It was getting past 8 p.m. at this point, and it was clear that my stated goal of a quick pop in wasn't going to happen. I slyly went to the porch for a Dr Pepper and then recused myself to another room while my grandparents and the lawyer resumed discussing the task at hand.
I drank my coke and ate a few of the cookies that Granny makes special for me while politely trying not to listen. I caught up on whatever I'd missed on Twitter while I'd been driving, occasionally picking up on things like "DNR" and "mineral rights" from the other room.
After another 45 minutes or so, Dean seemed satisfied and left.
At this point, Paw Paw complained that he was aching from sitting so long, so he stood and ambled around the living room. Granny moved to her rocking chair and I sat in another rocking chair beside her.
I thought about what I had written about Paw Paw's time with the gas company. I essentially only knew what I had laid out in the post from a few weeks ago.
Seeing as I am now the third consecutive Gregory to earn his keep on the back of America's most efficient heating fuel, I figured that would be as easy an egress into the story of my grandfather's life as any. It turns out my romanticized notion of Paw Paw working his way up from the bottom to a comfortable position wasn't an exaggeration at all. In fact, it played out pretty much as I imagined it.
I told my brother about the conversation and he wanted me to write down as much as I can remember, so I'm going to try to do that now. I mostly asked about his life as an adult, and almost all in relation to his working life, so I'm not sure how the entire timeline works out. I'll have to ask more about that later.
My grandfather was born in 1930. He grew up in Rosenberg, Texas on a farm. He had several brothers and sisters (the exact number of which I don't know). Two of his older brothers served in World War II. His eldest was in the Pacific, and was an honor guard when Gen. MacArthur signed the formal surrender of Japan. Maybe he's in this photo somewhere?
Paw Paw lit up again when he told that story - "Imagine that, a country boy from Texas with a third grade education being there when they ended the war."
His other brother, Archie, didn't see combat, but Paw Paw said that he wanted to. I wanted to ask more about this, but I got distracted.
Paw Paw himself served in the Naval Reserves. He joined in 1938 and spent four years as a supply sergeant, handing out uniforms and such. He received his honorable discharge from the Navy and set about building a life for himself.
At this point, I assume he was married to my grandmother, but I don't know.
Originally he was working at a service station (apparently not for the gas company, I'm not sure), but his mother didn't like him doing that, so she had Archie, who was already a gas man, get him a job in Houston.
Somehow, Uncle Sam came calling again. Through some snafu with the paperwork, Paw Paw ended up finding himself conscripted into the Army and living on a base in California.
I find the fact that he seemingly didn't do much to contest this pretty hilarious and indicative of my family's general attitude toward life and authority figures. I'd say my own predisposition to deferring to my elders pales in comparison to potentially serving in Korea rather than risk rocking the boat.
Luckily for him, the base he was at had been recently reactivated after a long dormancy and was thus infested with mold and rot. Paw Paw suffered from asthma and the nasty blankets rendered him unable to breathe. (Despite him washing it, he informed me.)
He ended up in the medical ward and the chief officer on the base happened to be a physician. He was making rounds with the sick soldiers and asked my grandfather what his situation was. Paw Paw explained what was going on, at some point articulating that he already had his discharge, which he fished out of his pack and showed the officer.
The morning after he finished recuperating, the officer fetched him from his bunk and told him that he was having a meeting with some sort of review board. At the meeting, the officer told them Paw Paw's story and asked why a man who had already served four years was coughing and sputtering up California when he had a wife at home in Texas. The other officers saw the validity of this question and he was sent home that day. It happened to be the 89th day of his service. GI benefits kick in after 90 days.
Back in Houston, he rejoined the gas company and began building a life part two. He started digging ditches and eventually moved up to a more general service technician position, working on pipelines and meters and what-not, before moving on to a fabrication shop.
I can't remember the exact timeline, but at some point he started going in on weekends on his own time to observe and learn more about some process that the company was doing, and when his supervisor found out, he just moved him to that team. From there, he held a series of jobs within the company, most of the seemingly awful.
Near as I can tell, Paw Paw figured out which job was the least coveted and set out to do it. He was in charge of telling people that their gas was being shut off, he was on a team that swapped out meters (boring and tedious), and, eventually, his superiors realized that he had a knack for dealing with unpleasant situations, so they sent him out to shape up service centers that were having trouble with the unions.
From there, he became a kind of roving clean-up man - turning underperforming service centers into performing ones. I asked him how he did this, whether he was imposing or conciliatory. He told me that all he did was sit down with whoever he identified as troublemakers and told them to shape up. This seemingly did the trick for all but one recalcitrant rogue, but he was undone by smoking a marijuana cigarette in his company vehicle.
He worked his way up in the company, eventually becoming a district manager. The company sent him to training at Texas A&I at once point and it was an experience that seemed to profoundly affect him. He was so grateful for the instruction that he had Granny help him draft a letter of thanks.
At this point, the conversation took a short digression into how much Granny had helped him over the years. He smiled radiantly at her as she sat rocking and occasionally chiming in.
I was charmed by the old worldliness of this story. His simple expression of gratitude enacted with the helping hand of his wife. It was a move entirely devoid of cynicism in a way that I think is almost impossible these days.
At some point, my aunts and father were born. He bought several houses, but he seemed to have a shaky hold on the real estate game. Each time he told me about a new house, it sounded great, but then they'd get robbed or something and they'd feel compelled to move to a different neighborhood.
It was around this part in the story that I glanced at the clock and realized how late it was. Paw Paw was still going strong, but Granny had nodded off a little in her chair.
He moved on to telling me a little about his home life, about how he coached my dad in little league, and how he thought he was really special pitcher.
When he brought up my dad, I did something that I'd never really done before, which was study his face. There's a penciled portrait of my Paw Paw that hangs in their living room. It was a retirement gift and it shows him sitting at his desk in his office, holding a pencil and smiling a big, broad smile. It's my go-to mental image of Paw Paw.
If I had to pick one word to describe my grandfather physically, it would probably be broad. He has big ears and his smile stretches the corners of his face.
In my mind, he's always been a physical presence, not fat, but substantive. This may be vestigial memory from a time when I was tiny and therefore every adult human had some heft, but the truth remains, when I conjure up an image of my grandfather, there's a physicality to it that is almost outside the realm of normal people.
However, sitting in that chair, listening to him talk about my dad, I started to search for the resemblance, and I saw it. Their noses are nearly identical and he has the deep-set eyes that all three of us share. It was one of those unusual moments where you realize that you've always viewed someone a certain way and then find yourself seeing them differently.
This visual observation coupled with the story he was telling fundamentally altered the way that I viewed him. He ceased existing in my mental category of "grandfather" (which is mythic and unassailable and also profoundly unknowable [essentially by design]) and started to take on a life of his own, as a fully realized person with emotions beyond delight at seeing me and frustration with Gary Kubiak.
So he went on telling this story, about how he thought my dad had the potential to be a great pitcher and it's at this point that I interjected, and told a story that I had only recently learned from my dad about how high school baseball affected him, about how he didn't get along with his coach and about how it made him get up in his head and play poorly.
As I was telling that story, I experienced this cathartic state that I can't fully articulate. I almost stepped outside of myself and glimpsed, however briefly, how the stories of my grandfather and my father led to my story and reflected my story in an almost recursive pattern. I felt how deeply Paw Paw believed that my dad had a special talent, which informed further how I felt about my dad telling me his story about how he felt playing baseball, which in turn added all of these new layers to my own experience playing.
I remember when my dad told me about him getting the yips in high school. I wondered why he waited until I was 23 to tell me. It made me think of one day when I was 16, driving down the loop in Lubbock in my red Galaxie 500, crying because I hated baseball and hated my coach, but more than anything, hated the thought of letting my dad down by quitting. It made me wonder how I would have approached the game differently if I'd known at 16 that I wasn't alone in having this experience. That at one point in his life, he too had been so demoralized by the situation around him that it had started to affect his play.
Hearing Paw Paw talk shed new light on that story. It made me realize that my father, too, had a dad that he didn't want to disappoint. I wondered if Paw Paw ever told my dad that he thought he was a special player. I wondered if that was why my dad never put any pressure on me to aspire to certain levels of play - if he felt like he was doing me a service by letting me figure out what I wanted on my own.
If that sounds like a negative realization, it wasn't at all. It may have been bittersweet, but what it really was was deeply grounding. In that moment, I felt a connection with my father and grandfather that was, for lack of a better word, orienting. In understanding those two men better, I understood myself better and my love for both of them deepened.
It made me regret not taking the time earlier to explore my family story, especially for someone like me who claims to be so invested in both story and family.
The conversation sort of trailed off after this, and I sent Paw Paw and Granny to bed before making my way back out into the muggy Houston air. It was a city that I never really knew, having moved away when I was only three, but at that moment, reflecting on my father and grandfather and all of the Gregorys way back to when Stanislas first came over from Poland, I felt at home.
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