Spring Street
This isn't meant to be poetic, or linear, or good. It's not for anyone but my Grampa.
My grandparents lived on Spring Street since the day they got married. They lived there through World War II, when Grampa left for Europe with the Army. He returned to his wife and a toddler son he never met, the jagged memory of a German bayonet sprawled across his chest. He got a job at the High School as a janitor, fathered another son, but he never mentioned the war, not like his bunker buddies down at the Polish Club, not once over sixty years. When he died just a few weeks ago, he left behind a safe deposit box with two important medals of valor under a faded American flag. No one knew he earned them. No one in my family knows why, knows how.
When I think of Spring Street, I don't think of the short road connecting the main drag to the elm-lined state college perimeter. I don't think of the rusty train that coughs and wails at the corner station. I just think of my grandparents and their house, an old New England three-tenement building that stands after years of love and neglect, all rolled into some solitary emotion. Spring Street means overgrown lilacs and stacks of molding egg cartons filled with the golf balls Grampa found on the college campus. Spring Street means Gramma rolling dough for pizza and Grampa diving for simple treasure in the dumpsters behind the strip mall adjoining his property.
I lived in the bottom-floor apartment of my Grampa and Gramma's house for two years, when I was young, barely married, with a baby girl on my hip and a baby boy on the way. My husband worked long hours. I pushed my daughter down Spring Street in a pram, Grampa at my side. We searched the dumpsters together, found boxes of new greeting cards, cases of out of style shampoo, new cassette tapes with one-hit-wonder artists. Grampa stuffed everything in his "cold room," the master bedroom of the top tenement apartment. Most of the stuff still sits there, waits for the professional cleaners my dad hired to cart it away. Those are days of my life, I think. Each of those cards is filled with the breath I took when I was young, before I knew life never got easy, got slow.
Grampa taught me how to live in the moment. He was never bored. He always had something to do, even if the something was sitting in his parlor reading a Louis LAmour mystery book for hours or listening to endless Red Sox games on a radio turned up way too high. He walked five miles a day until he turned 88 years old, then decided that three miles a day was plenty.
When my Gramma died a few years ago, Grampa learned how to cook for the first time in his life. He told me about his successes and failures over the telephone, and I pictured him on Spring Street, way across the entire country, with a frying pan filled with pierogi and cabbage, his short arms reaching high to reach the salt on the top shelf. He missed Gramma something fierce, but filled his time with daily visits to church where the priest let him stand at his side during the consecration, the world's oldest alter boy.
Grampa kept a complicated relationship with his two sons. I heard bits and pieces over my forty years about my uncle being the favorite, about the ways my dad felt slighted. I always wanted to hear more, but Grampa liked his secrets. I learned about making my own mysteries from listening to Grampa, and one day when he asked me a simple question about what I did the prior week, I grunted the way he would do when he didn't want to offer an explanation.
"Good." I could hear him smile three thousand miles away.
Two summers ago I drove my three sons 8,500 miles in one month, visiting all of our relatives along the way, our most important destination being Grampa's house on Spring Street. The entire trip I told 17, 10 and 8 how much fun I had with Grampa when I was a young girl. They didn't believe me. They didn't think an old man with a crooked nose and dirty fingernails who could barely hear them on the telephone could be very much fun. They didn't remember the way Grampa swung them higher than the sky, the nights laying on his couch listening to the victrola. We spent two full days playing golf, casting fishing line into the puddles in Grampa's dirt driveway, tossing baseballs, wrestling, and driving down to the coast to see the Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower. Whenever we talk about our trip, we talk about Grampa, and the way he wanted us to see all the places and things that he thought were special. When we drove out of the driveway, our windows rolled down, we all yelled "Bye, Grampa!"
But Grampa shook his head and corrected us.
"Never say Goodbye. Just say See You Later."
Grampa lived on his own, in his same Spring Street home, until six weeks before his death. I thought he would live forever. He passed before my sons could see him one more time. I flew to see him, at a time close to his death, when he lay in a hospital bed, his arms bruised from too many needle pricks, too many attempts to make an old heart work. I scratched off a lottery ticket I bought for him at a convenience store, and we laughed when he won three dollars. I knew it was the last time I would see him alive. I wanted to stay at his side, wanted to hold his hand forever, until Gramma caught it again up in heaven. But I had to leave for home, for my young boys and pets and slow spring Avon. I didn't want to say goodbye. So I said the only thing I could.
"See you later, Grampa."
I miss him. I miss Spring Street.
12:41:22 PM 
|
|
