I’ve been given this notebook by my mother, in hopes I can get over the soon to be loss of my pops. That is not my dad, it’s my grandpa. He’s turning 52 this year, and last year he was diagnosed with something called AIDs. I guess I am having a hard time coping for a lot of reasons. And I guess I should probably expand on this.
When I was just 15 pop’s bursted into my life more than ever. Most people my age aren’t perfectly aquainted with their grandparents, and usually aren’t doing much to help that, and sorta’ just sitting around waiting for inheritance. In my case I didn’t really have much of a choice. The most I had known of him since the age of seven was the sometimes insulting language my mother used towards him, and the occasional birthday card that was sent 7 months late.
When pop’s moved in I was just 14, and we were living in a pretty small house in Lucknow, Ontario, and it was the summer before I would enter my first year of highschool at F.E. Madill. He had just left his girlfriend whom he lived with in Rhode Island, and moved in with me and mom (he was mom’s dad and her mom has been on hiatus since I was two). Though, I never really learned exactly what city he lived in, he just kept telling me that Lucknow was a “nice change of scenery”-whatever that meant.
After he moved in, he kept to himself a whole lot. When I went to school he was usually asleep, and when I got home he was usually at the bar. He would get home a lot around 1 AM and I would usually still be awake. If it was a school night I would usually be in bed, and I would hear my mom struggling to help him find his bed, and his constant apologetic voice echoing through the hallway. Occasionally I would hear him crying in the night, but mostly I would hear him snoring. See, as I said previously we were living in a pretty small place at the time, and when he showed up he got the sitting room between mine and my mothers, so not hearing him would have been impossible.
After a while when I couldn’t sleep at night I began to just get up and read. I used to read everything in sight, my mom’s old reader’s digests, books I would rent from the library, occasionally even recipe books. When that got boring, I would just sit in the front room by the window and watch the sky, and this became common practice within a month because I had read pretty much everything I felt interested in.
On occasion he would come thru the door around the time I would get up, which would be fairly late for him (like 3AM) and he would come and sit with me for a few moments. When he first started doing it, he would come through the door and look over at me sitting in the chair staring up at the stars and he would immediately get real quiet. It was like he would sober up instantly at the sight of me.
The first night he ever sat down with me he came through the door and took his shoes off and glanced over towards the room I was in, not seeing me, grabbed the top of the couch and hopped over it perfectly landing in a comfortable laying down position without making too much of a noise at all. This of course, didn’t cause him to “sneak-up” on me, but it was a good way of keeping my mom from noticing he was home. When he opened his eyes and saw me staring back at him he let out a bit of a yelp. “Oh god!” he said, and made me laugh pretty hard considering I hadn’t even tried to scare him. He asked me questions like how the weather was, and whether or not my mother was awake, and then he told me he loved me and went to bed. It was interesting to hear that from a person you never see (yet live with). As he stumbled off to bed, I never really thought this would be the beginning of any sort of strong relationship, but boy was I wrong.
After a few times of this happening, he started asking me more in depth questions. It was weird for a drunk person to act this way, and he never really addressed the fact that he was drunk, but he constantly asked me things about my life. He would ask if I had a girlfriend, and I would always answer ‘No’ and he would always ask me after that “boyfriend?” to which I would also reply ‘No’, but the question always persisted.
One night he came home, and it was raining real hard, and he came through the door soaking wet, with a large black case in his hand and he brought it into the front room. He just looked at me and grinned, as he set it down on the coffee table. When he popped it open the contents of the case were a wooden acoustic guitar with steel strings and a metal clip on the first part of the neck.
He pulled the guitar from its case and started to pluck the strings lightly with a plastic shard that was in his right hand. Then he began to play a song, later on he told me he learned this from an old friend that subsequently killed himself the following week, and thus the song held quite the meaning to him. The song went like this, and though he only knew a few stanzas for singing, he occasionally made up lyrics for it involving his friends and nature, and other things.
By the rivers of Babylon
Where he sat down
And there he wept
When he remembered Zion
Oh when the wicked
Carried us away in captivity
Requiring of us a song
Now how shall we sing the lords song in a Strange Land
So let the words of our mouths(and the) meditations of our hearts
Be acceptable in thy sight
Oh Tonight
As the years went by and he began teaching me guitar as he knew it (which was limited at best) this song started being the main base of everything I thought of in method, and was so grateful that he could share it with me that one night.
It was in these years I developed a need for something more. I developed a wanting for a larger surrounding, to be where the things that were happening-were happening. And in the coming years, that’s what I hope I will get.
