I thought a lot about my grandfather this year, and not because turning forty is making me consider my own mortality. I think I’ve aged pretty well, thank you very much. But because it was the tenth anniversary of his death and because I was in DC for the cherry blossoms just days before the anniversary. My grandfather’s funeral was held at Iavonne Funeral Home in New Haven, right in the heart of Wooster Square, which is lined with cherry trees. The day of my grandfather’s funeral was sunny and warm, and all the cherry trees were in bloom. It was a gloriously beautiful day.
My grandfather was a rough-edged, foul-mouthed son of a bitch with a fifth grade education. He was a cop for thirty-five years. He rode a motorcycle. He had a blackbelt in judo. He was Mayor Dick Lee’s bodyguard. He served in the Navy between the world wars, where he had burst an eardrum in a diving bell off the coast of Panama. He had sixteen tattoos, mostly acquired during the two years he was stationed in the South Pacific. My favorite was the tattoo of Betty Boop on his right bicep. He used to make her dance for me. He had been an auto mechanic and a trucker. He drove what he called the mountain run, from Providence to Albany along Route 44, before power steering or power brakes. Simply turning and stopping were death-defying feats.
When I was sixteen he was seventy-two. He bought me a shitbox of a car, a ’75 Chevelle with body rot and a hole in the radiator. It got eight miles to the gallon and had an eight-track tape deck. His reasoning was that if I hit or got hit by anything, I’d win, and I wouldn’t care about the damage to my car. One time I met him downtown in New Haven for something that today escapes my memory. Parting from him and merging onto the highway, I inadvertently cut off a carful of guys about my age. They began following me and then driving up alongside me, threatening me. I wasn’t easily intimidated, but the reckless and unrelenting nature of their aggression frightened me. Suddenly my grandfather’s enormous red truck came barreling up from behind our cars and drove right between us. As soon as their car swerved away, he drove right at them, diagonally across the highway and onto the embankment. Then he sped off without so much as tipping his cap at me.
Another time a few years later, he was parked downtown off Grand Avenue, in front of Tobacco Joe’s, an old-school smoke shop owned by a friend of his. It was the crack of dawn and none of the shops were open yet, so my grandfather just sat there smoking his cigar with the window down, the engine running, and the police radio on. Some kid walked up from behind him and put a gun to his head and demanded his wallet. My grandfather still carried his gun in a side holster. He struck the kid’s arm away, pulled his own gun on the kid, and when the kid ran, my grandfather dropped his idling truck into gear and drove up onto the sidewalk after the kid till he ran down an alleyway too narrow for the truck. My grandfather then drove back to his parking spot out front of his friend’s store, holstered his gun, and lit a new cigar to replace the one he’d dropped in the street during all the commotion. He never even called in the attempted armed robbery.
When he entered the police academy, my grandfather passed a test that was the equivalent of a GED exam. He wrote daily police reports, and kept a meticulous journal of his daily events. Even in retirement he continued to chronicle his trips to the coffee shop, his walks to get the mail, how much time he spent raking leaves, and the maintenance he did on his and my grandmother’s cars. He never wrote his stories, however, yet he had thousands of great stories. He loved to talk, and loved to tell me his stories. Most of them I remember and can retell, but I always told myself that one day I would interview him and write down as many stories as I could glean from him. Even into his early eighties he was hale and healthy, and it seemed that I had plenty of time.
But one day he drove downtown to the coffee shop and arrived early as usual. Since it was winter, he left his engine running and got out to clean his windows while he waited. His shoulders had become worn out from years of hard labor, and he couldn’t raise his arms. He had a column shift on his truck, and he had failed to put the truck all the way into park. While he cleaned the back window, a sand truck drove by. The vibrations from the bigger truck caused the column shift to drop into reverse, and the idling truck knocked down my grandfather and ran over him. He actually managed to drive himself to the emergency room, but after that accident he was forced to use a walker, which he hated and avoided. Not long afterwards, while working in the garage, he tried to climb the four steps from the garage to the house. His bad leg gave out, and he fell head first onto the pavement, precipitating a stroke. He died a couple of weeks after.
Ten years later, watching the cherry blossoms fall in DC, I felt the need to tell some of his stories.
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