The best you can hope for is to
be remembered.
This
year marks the 20th year since Big Dink’s death. And when we gather for Father’s Day 2018,
he’ll be very much “alive” in
memories. There will be wads of damp
Kleenexes. Rarely do we get through those
remembering-Granddaddy sessions that we don’t have to dab the corners of our
eyes—some from laughter, some from sweet memories.
Living
across the street from my folks gave our children a chance to have daily
experiences with their grandparents.
Alan, Emily and Eric got to enjoy their granddaddy’s semi-retired and
retired mellow years. He didn’t go to
the office, but he never stopped working.
Neighbors
teased that he caught pine cones on their first bounce. Big Dink was a stickler
about his yard. While there was a riding
Snapper in the shed, he preferred pushing a lawn mower for the exercise. His funeral home director’s days were filled
with starched shirts and neckties, but he wasn’t afraid to get dirty and
sweat. In fact—when he’d finish in the
yard—he’d head to the laundry room, where he’d strip off his sopping, nasty
clothes and streak to the shower.
When
he came back clean and clothed, Mother would typically have an egg-salad sandwich,
chips, some carrot sticks and a glass of ice water waiting. All these years later, Alan does a perfect
imitation of his granddaddy rattling the ice in a dimpled, green plastic
tumbler. Shaking a glass, Alan says, “Granddaddy says that makes the water
colder.” And when he rattles it some
more, everyone nods and laughs.
There’s
a sandwich shop across the street from the office where Eric and I work. About once a week, he and I order egg-salad
sandwiches and reminisce about those days on the corner of Ninth and Persimmon
streets. I can almost hear the sucking
sound Big Dink and Margie’s hollow-core back door made when we opened it to
step into their kitchen. Invariably,
Mother would scramble to her feet. “Sit
here,” she’d say, “while I make you and the kids a sandwich.” And my dad would rattle his glass and wipe
the egg salad off his moustache.
Emily
likes to tell the little-girl story about how she and her cousins, Morgan and
Sail, loved to pile up in the same bed at their grandparents’ house. Once, in the middle of the night, the three
decided it was too hot. Emily tiptoed into the hall and pulled the thermostat
down to a polar-bear setting. The next
morning, Granddaddy came out of his room with a blue nose and goosebumps. You knew
he was in his mellow years when the famous penny-pinching grandpa laughed the loudest. That story always gets hands reaching for
the Kleenex.
Eric
was the last of the six grandchildren.
His grandmother nicknamed him “PJ,” for biblical disciples Peter and
John—big and strong, but tender-hearted.
One day, Eric was in his granddaddy’s woodworking shop when Big Dink
asked him to step on a board. With a
pencil, he traced Eric’s foot for a shoeshine-box top pattern. Before my dad died, he made more than 200 of
those boxes for sales associates in our company. And on the bottom of Eric and Alan’s
shoeshine boxes, he wrote his birthdate … so that they’d never forget Feb. 8,
1922.
Forget?
Not
a chance.
Pass
that box of tissues.
Happy Father’s Day.
dnesmith@cninewspapers.com
