Grandpa Jack

by
Kyra Anderson

     He wasn't really my grandfather, in the sense that he wasn't my father's real father. He married my grandmother when he was barely twenty and all three of her kids were in their teens. He was much younger than Grandma, but he aged quickly to be polite and to keep her company. That's the way he was. He did the right thing. He was a Clean American. That's what we remember most about him. He would bend way way down and present his brushy-topped head to us. "Feel it. Go ahead now, feel it. That there's CLEAN hair, that is." He always wore his crew cut and his cowboy ties and one of several windbreakers with the square dancing couple on the upper right hand side, and he always owned the most recent model American car because he liked to drive Mommy around in style. That's what he called Grandma--Mommy. And she called him Jack, as in "Oh, Jack," with a coy slap and smile to admonish and to tease.
     Grandpa Jack was tall, strong, and clear--the antidote, perhaps, to the roguish Frank, my real grandfather. Frank was dead, dead before my father turned thirteen, dead as if some divine grace designed the rest he couldn't find in Boonton, New Jersey. After years of dodging a stream of ladies pregnant with his unborns, after directing traffic on the backs of stolen horses, and yanking hard salamis out of his trousers at neighborhood parties to lop them off with a cleaver and a loud slam of laughter, he went out in a cloud of dirt. Train yard dirt that spat back up at him as he drove down his last track pile along the Landing Railroad. A tiny vessel opened up in his head and he fell, hard and silent, like a duck shot out of the sky. My father said the funeral was like a dream; weary children clutching onto weeping women in black billowy veils.
     Grandma loved Grandpa Jack. He was the boarded cross on her summer house windows in the storm. He was the thin blue trauma blanket after the fire. He steadied her with his soft righteousness.
     He was a volunteer fireman and a square dancer, and he drove Grandma around the US of A several times over to meet his fellow countrymen and breathe in his land. He'd sail along at a steady 55, down the highways, freeways, and turnpikes in his clean hair and his fresh-smelling powder blue Pontiac, his square dancing flag whirring and humming in the interstate breeze. He passed on the left and kept his hands in the 2 and 10 o'clock position. When I was three, I rode from New Jersey to Michigan in the front seat, on the shiny vinyl, in-between Grandma and Grandpa. I looked up at him and warmed my small face in the rays of his sureness. He was the tortoise and we were all taken up under his shell. It was as if he had been born to shelter us.
     Grandpa Jack was fiercely protective of Grandma, ever alert to any word or action that may have stung or confused her. We never considered her in need of shielding, never considered her frail. She was a hand set to pinch. We didn't cross her. We'd shift from foot to foot in line when she checked our hands and ears for grit each night. But Grandpa had the broad view of her, saw her small shadow set against the wide, white horizon. He'd watch her, his lips pursed and poised, smiling quiet reassurance. I don't know how he knew to cup his bulky hands soft around the fractured place in her, but he knew it early on, and did it with ease, and the grandest part of him rose up and filled him with this knowing, this sound knowing of his right place, there, with her.  

Kyra Anderson is a poet and writer who lives between coasts at the moment. Her work has appeared in Tiny Lights  and Bust Out  magazine.