My grandfather. He enlisted in the Navy at age fifteen, thanks to a well crafted fake birth certificate. His ship was hit while at sea, and he was thrown twenty feet in the air, sustaining an arm injury that he never quite recovered from. This was not long after he had met my grandmother, a dark haired, red lipsticked beauty with perfectly coiffed hair and perpetually sad green eyes. Their marriage photo looks like an homage to classic forties romance, him in his dress uniform and a smirk, her in a collared dress and perfectly porcelain skin. A drunk, sometimes angry and sometimes infectiously happy. When angry he beat his wife and daughter mercilessly, broke dishes and drove wrecklessly through town… I would suppose to try and end it all. There were darker things too, things that aren’t mine to tell, but that changed my mother irrevocably. But then, there was the other side. When happy, he used to sing dirty old sailor songs with a coffee cup filled with whiskey in his hand and a lit Marlboro Red clamped between his perfectly straight white teeth. He would teach me how to two-step, when I close my eyes and drift back I can remember the way his favorite shirt felt under my hands, paper thin and soft as skin, thirty years old if it was a day. His smell, distinctive but never overwhelming, set my expectations for how men are supposed to smell. A hint of aftershave under layers of tobacco, liquor, and Wrigley’s gum.
He died, a little over a month after my daughter was born. I was at his side, stroking his arms and tracing patterns in the same hands that led me around the kitchen floor when he taught me how to dance. The same hands that had bruised my grandmother, bloodied my mother, lifted the bottle to his lips. The hands that had built a house, fought in a war, built an oil pipeline, buried two children, and rocked me to sleep when I was just days old. I held them until they were cold and stiff in mine.
As the one child out of my mother’s six who is endlessly compared to my grandfather, every time I feel my head begin to spin out of control I can think only of all of the things he was. Dynamic and dangerous. Inspiring and terrifying. A beautiful cacophany of conflicting traits and emotions, who in the end had lost most of what he loved by giving into his restlessness.
Instead of offering a clear solution by way of his own redemption, these memories only leave me with more and more questions.