Two nights ago, I posted about a trip I took to the moon Bruno, Nebraska with my unwilling co-pilot, my brother, Joel. It got me thinking about the second and last time I ever visited the village. This is how it works with me now. A memory sparks a memory, which hopefully sparks a memory that is worthy of spending some time sharing it with an unwitting reader.
My grandparents on my dad's side lived on a farm when I was growing up. They were Max and Cheryl "Billie" Kliment. He was a farmer, she, a housewife. Their farm was located between Saunders and Butler Counties. It was in the middle of a section, with a long, gravel driveway, where my brother and I searched for the best and prettiest rocks on our trips to get the mail for Grandma. The driveway led to a pale, yellow house, trimmed in white, with a large tree out front, whose trunk had long ago split into two giant branches. There was a barn, and several out-buildings, and set further from the house, a machine shed. There were goldfish in the cow's water tank, and a creek bed that ran one side of the property. Sometimes the creek had a little water in it. Most of the time it was dry. It was a place ripe with adventure for two young explorers. My brother would grab his plastic machine gun that made noise when you pulled the trigger, and we would set off, spending hours just wandering and seeing what there was to see.
Often, on our visits, we were under my grandma's feet, and I remember following her around her house. The washing machine was on the enclosed front porch. She had a giant cook-stove in the corner where I saw the first ever poached egg of my young life. Her kitchen counters were low enough for me to reach, because they were custom build for her stature. There was candy in the cupcake shaped candy dish on the dining room table, where I never remember sitting, even though it had the good, soft cushioned chairs. Grandma saved her empty makeup compacts for me in a box on the front porch, so I could 'put on my face' when I was visiting. During our times there, despite Grandpa being home, he busied himself with other activities. There was, I am sure now, plenty for him to do that didn't involve two little kids.
Grandpa was a quiet man. He had a facial tick,which made it look like he winked a lot. He wore overalls a lot of the time. He walked with a cane. He drove a Mercury Marquis and a Ford F-150. He upgraded the years occasionally, but never the models. He drank a lot of coffee. I was later to discover that he had a wicked and biting sense of humor. He never appeared to be in a great hurry to get anywhere, in fact, I believe that the only time I ever saw him rush to do anything was finish his cup of coffee. Black, strong, Butternut coffee. None of this cream and sugar nonsense for Grandpa. He would often ask if we wanted a cup, and if we said yes, he would tell us that it was too hot. He had an outside, long haired cat, named Diana. He fed the cat in the machine shed, and closed her in it every night for her safety. During the day he left the doors cracked, just enough so she could come and go as she pleased. He came to my house and played with our dog, a Dachshund named Kandy. She didn't like his cane, and tried to bite it, while barking and growling. He laughed and shook it around at her. I suppose that a person who didn't know him may have been intimidated by him, but to me, he was just Grandpa. He had the best little half-smile when he found something funny. As a young girl, I once asked him why he walked so bent over, and he told me he was looking for pennies on the ground. I spent the next three days of my life with my face turned downward, thinking that I had been missing a plethora of pennies that had been unknowingly scattered at my feet. He sold seed corn. I once mailed him poem, cut from a magazine, entitled The Farmer, by Amelia Barr. He never acknowledged it. He teased me that his middle name was a secret, and it drove me crazy with curiosity, until my grandma told me that he didn't have a middle name. I was thirteen years old before it occurred to me to wonder why we didn't have the same last name. As it happens, he was my dad's step-father. He was married before my Grandma, having lost his first wife and newborn son within days of one another in 1950. He was a World War II veteran. He liked playing cards, and taught his young granddaughter how to play Kings In The Corner by thoroughly trouncing me several times, despite my grandma pleading with him to play nicer. He was a serious Pitch player. I once cost us a game of Pitch and I'm not sure he ever truly forgave me.
Grandma and Grandpa lived on the farm until the summer before I entered my Freshman year of high school. At that point, they auctioned their belongings and moved to a house in David City. There, grandpa kept his yard in tip top shape and had more time for friends, coffee and cards.
When I was in my early 20's, I got a call that my grandma had been admitted to the hospital. I traveled the 50 miles from where I lived, and joined family at her hospital bed. If my memory serves, she was suffering from a ruptured hernia, which required surgery. As we waited in the small hospital, my grandpa said very little. When we were able to see her after surgery, I heard his sigh of relief, as if he had been holding his breath for all the hours he had been there. My groggy grandmother said that she supposed they wouldn't be going for dinner in Bruno that evening. Grandpa looked slightly distraught. She, from her bed, still woozy from the anesthesia, worried about what he would do for dinner. I offered to take him home and cook him something, but he instead asked if I wanted to go with him to Bruno, so the two of us said our goodbyes and headed for the parking lot. My grandpa stopped several times along the way to greet people he knew. I climbed into the passenger seat of their Mercury Marquis, an impeccable silvery car that was approximately 948 feet long. I've sat on couches that were less comfortable than this car seat. Off we went, just the two of us. It was the first time in any memory that I was truly alone with my grandpa.
David City to Bruno is roughly fifteen miles, though I didn't know that at the time. I knew that he sat behind the wheel with the confidence of someone who had a lot of things to look at, and all the time in the world to see them. We left the hospital sometime around four o'clock in the afternoon. We pulled up in front of the bar in Bruno sometime close to five. I hadn't paid that much attention, as I was trying to formulate a plan to ask my grandpa about himself. Instead, we rode in silence, except for a moment when he pointed out a deer in a far off field. Truth be told, I never saw the deer. I looked in the direction he pointed and I pretended, because I didn't know what else to do.
I was in a place in my life where I had started to seek a wider view of the people I loved. To see the very human, loving interactions between my grandparents had kick-started a curiosity in me. Who was this man, outside of being Grandpa? How does one go about asking questions that I was ashamed I didn't already know the answers to?
Upon entering the bar, Grandpa was greeted by several friends. It was a booming business. I think there were fifteen people inside. We took spots at the end of a long table of his friends, and someone came to the table and asked, "Where's Billie?" My grandpa responded that he had "traded her in for a younger model". He got a lot of laughs. It took me awhile to realize that he never expanded on the point. He just went about his dinner, visiting, and drinking coffee, letting the people believe whatever they wanted. An elderly woman sitting next to me asked, as the waitress was taking my plate away, where Billie was, and I told her the story of my grandmother's surgery. She gently scolded my grandpa, telling him to let my grandma know they'd be stopping by the following day.
Here again, was evidence that my grandparents existed in a world far outside of the one they lived in in my narrow view. They had an entire social circle. I sat, ever the observer, and watched many interactions between my grandfather and the people coming and going from a small town bar on a warm summer evening. It only fed my need to know more. When he drank down the last dredges of coffee in his cup, he gave everyone's favorite, mid-western indication that it was time to go. "Welp." He refused to let me pay for dinner, and we returned to the silver land yacht of a car that had delivered us to the village. The sun was fading in the sky.
I am confident in guessing that the speedometer never surpassed twenty-five miles an hour during the trip back to David City. I was nervous about starting a conversation, and when I get nervous, I usually have to pee, so my bladder was even more full than my mind, when I smelled something putrid. Initially, I blamed some farm animal. I cracked the window on my side of the car, and realized very quickly that it wasn't a smell from outside the vehicle. I said nothing. Grandpa rolled the window up from the controls on his side of the car, also silent. Several minutes later, a similar smell wafted in the air, and I again, opened my window. And again, he rolled it up. Twice more, we battled the stench and the window with a pregnant silence. I was a millimeter from laughing myself silly, and I couldn't take it anymore. I didn't want to call him out, no one could have paid me to embarrass him, so I bargained with myself that the best course of action was to avoid the subject completely. I erupted with, "Grandpa, tell me something about yourself!"To which he replied, smirk firmly in place, "I got gas."
Be still my curious heart. (And tell me something I hadn't already learned myself in the worst possible way!"
We howled the rest of the way back to David City. It took one hour and ten minutes to get back to David City, and I know that because the laughing hadn't helped the situation with my full bladder, and I watched every minute tick by on the green digital clock in the dash. Because we had all met at the hospital, we returned there, where I (blissfully!) emptied my bladder, and where I watched, from the doorway, my grandfather lean and kiss my sleeping grandmother on the forehead. He patted her hand, and slowly turned to shuffle away.
My grandfather joined his first wife and baby son in the fall of 2003. When he died, my grandma found an envelope with my childlike handwriting, holding the poem I had sent him years before. I suppose that's as sentimental as he was comfortable being. He was reunited with my grandma fifteen years later, in the spring of 2018. I don't know if he was allowed to escort her through the pearly gates, but if he was, I am sure she had plenty of time to see all the sights on the way.
He never really answered the questions I had, but nonetheless, he told me all I needed to know.
The Farmer by Amelia Barr
"God bless the man who sows the wheat,
Who finds us milk and fruit and meat;
May his purse be heavy, his heart be light,
His cattle and corn and all go right;
God bless the seeds his hands let fall,
For the farmer he must feed us all.
No comments:
Post a Comment