Sailors and Cowhands

"I Ride an Old Paint" was another of my favorite songs from the semester. The idea of honoring a dead person's wishes is such an interesting one to me, given that it is both such a heavy, important thing to do but also one with no accountability. One other thing that stood out to me about the song is the interpretive difficulty in understanding certain words: "hoolihan"; "snuffy"; and "Dan." There almost seems to be an unspoken, inside story the song is telling that is not meant for the listener to understand completely. I tried to mimic this, in content, by having the narrator know so little about his Grandfather.

I found Grandpa’s unwashed socks under a lump in his bedspread. He liked to wear them, shoeless, as he meandered around the tipping wire fence of his vegetable garden, embroidered by butterfly weed, in search of which corner he had stuck the tomato patch. His bed was otherwise made taught. I don’t know who did it. Dad’s been sleeping on the love seat in Grandma’s room, watching the Packers with her to pass the time, until the house will swell with visitors, and kind remarks, and comments on cold cut selections, about it being a while.

Other than the socks, he left little behind in the room. He would not have made the bed, so the nuances of which side of the blanket he would have kept tucked under the mattress as he slipped himself in, of how he would have had the pillows arranged, of indents revealing in which curled position he slept—these are lost. There’s an old portrait of him and grandma. A silhouette, vaguely cliché, but his arthritic fingers are pointing West.  Other than this, it could be any old couple.

He also left a glass of water on his bedside table. There is a shallow pool, left unfinished, at its bottom. It’s beside the phone, which he used for his two-bit conversations. “Hello, hope you’re doing well, goodbye.” And next to that there a few packets of seeds. He tore the corners off rather than pulling along the perforated lines. Delicacy was too sentimental, meant for city slickers. Collected dirt always painted the underside of his fingernails, on his calloused hands.

I know enough about him to fill a page in a planner. Lifetime achievements shucked of their narratives and wrapped up put in a corner, like corn on the grill.  He was in the Navy. He was in the Pacific. He had a brother in a wheelchair, suffering from some since vanquished disease. (They talked on birthdays, according to Grandma.) His life remains a connect the dots, backwards looking so neat and tidy, the trembling hand moving from A to B erased and penned over.

The socks have holes. I wonder if he knew this. If some of the hard soil in the garden crept in and swarmed his blistered toes. If this reminded him of walking barefoot, in some memory he did not share, with t-shirts folded up into baskets for his Amarilos. 

Dad tells me I should get out of the house. It’s a nice day, there’s some shade in the far corner of the garden where it kisses the woods. I show Dad the seeds on the table. I say I’ll go plant them, but then I never do, and we’re back on Fourth of July eating tomato sandwhiches with tomatoes from Maroney’s Market, and they’re GMO and seedless, and grandma  does not have to worry about choking but she still remarks they’re a bit too sour.