Grandpa

Grandpa worked in a Cleveland airport for thirty eight years as a vender selling hot dogs.  He said people at the airport dressed like they were going to a wedding and that maybe they were.  He called work “people watching”.  He said these things to his grandkids and his dogs.  Sometimes his dogs died, so he would leave a steak out by the back door, wait for a stray and catch it, yanking a rope tied to the gate.  Sometimes he’d catch the mailman or milkman as a joke.

I sat on the front porch once, on a dirt grained board that creaked.  He spoke up suddenly and said, “I don’t like people to watch me shit.”  I looked around, the pines and the pond suddenly looking out of place.  “In the war I shit in a hole for three years until I got hit.  Then I shit in a bowl.”  He creaked back in his seat, eyes slits to the sun.  I saw the Philippines, how he might have looked at the water.

My mom walked out with a small box full of things:  a welcome mat with pine trees, little bears, wolves and deer, his old coffee tin.  Then we took him to the home.