Grandpa Allen

  I grew up without grandparents.  My mother’s parents both died while she was still a young girl of eight years old; she was raised as a ward of the great state of New York.  My father’s mother died when he was fifteen; I was told an accidental fall out a window hanging laundry, oddly that happened a lot back then in the city.  My Father’s father died when I was all of four; my only vague memory is of an old man holding us kids in his grasp burning our faces and necks with his whiskers while we squirmed and squealed for mercy.  So my siblings and I didn’t have any grandparent tales to tell in school; but my best friend Brit had a Grandfather, and one day he came to live with them.  I had no reason to consider why that was, just that the old fellow was around for a while, and then just as suddenly, he was gone.  Now that I’m an adult I realize that many families hand off their surviving parent between the siblings periodically as just a family obligation. 

  What I knew of Grandpa Allen stuck with me until this very day.  He had been a professional boxer in his youth; we stared for a very long time at the photo of him in his prime; it was hard to recognize that fierce looking guy wearing black gloves waiting to engage in combat. He was hidden by age in the slightly overweight ball headed fellow who insisted that was him.  He also had a war trophy from World War II.  We knew about that one, we watched television, so that was like super-real-life mysterious for us.  It was a Japanese Officer Sword.  We wanted to see the wicked sword but he refused to take it out of its scabbard. He said he it had blood stains, and he didn’t want to upset us.  I was puzzled by that since I had seen plenty of blood by my seventh year, and a lot of it my own, and if he had been a boy once…long ago…he should have known, or at least remembered, that telling boys something had blood on it would only wet our curiosity all the more; so, like what gives? What was the big deal?  Later I surmised it was his effort to not get his butt kicked out of his daughters house over the pretense of warping her boy and his friend into admiring the violence and gore of combat; way, way, too late for that.  Much like the long dreaded talk on the birds and the bees…just dopey parents not being alert to the inquisitive nature of kids; we already found out.  Anyway, we thought the sword was cool and even tried to creep into his room when we thought he wasn’t around.  

But we could never find his hiding place, and in short order the fear of getting caught along with the idea of cooking ants with our magnifying class appealed to us more, so we quickly forget about the war trophy.  Lastly, and this may sound absurd, but it’s true. I remember Grandpa Allen for revealing a grown-up-truth.  One that only after I became an adult did it dawn on me that I had been warned.  It’s really a trifle, in the order of things; but because of it, I can still remember his face along with his gravelly voice. 

  It happened one day when both Brit and I were racing indoors to the toilet from our outside rough housing, because we really had to pee. Just as we turned the corner towards the lavatory, we ran into Grandpa Allen also on his way into the bathroom.  He told us to come along, that we could all use the toilet at the same time. 

(ah the benefits of being boys).  Just as curious boys pay attention to things unfamiliar, both Brit and I noticed Grandpa Allen’s pee dripped after he finished going.  I asked him why? He chuckled and told us because he was old, and that when we got old our pee would drip too.  Of course we didn’t believe him any more than there was something horrible about seeing blood on the Japanese sword; but who can call a man his age a liar?  Especially when he used to be a boxer? Heck he could have easily knocked both of us out even at his advanced age; or so we reasoned.

  I remember my mom telling me years later that he had died.  She asked me if I even remembered who he was?  When she said Grandpa Allen had died I instantly remembered him telling me that one day my pee would drip.

Now I have to wonder just what phrase I’m going to leave behind?  I’m partial to something useful like, Oh, “pass the salt”