man of steel

since my great-grandmother passed away, i've taken to calling my great-grandfather on sunday afternoons.

it's not easy to find a time that fits into both our schedules. disbelieve me if you like, but my grandfather doesn't exactly sit around. he reads his paper, he compares music, he goes visiting, attends events, davens at shul, goes to his meals, watches the game. the way we figured it there's about a half-hour between three-thirty and four on a sunday that he's available. perhaps this will sound like a familiar story to you, what with my father's mother (known in vernacular as the mother of my father) having so many 'affairs' herself. but it isn't the same kind of busy at all. i'm not sure i can explain even to myself why this is so.

it sounds strange to me now, but i always saw my great-grandfather as this kind of indestructable force. when i was little, my great-grandparents babysat for us all the time. my grandfather drove us to school, he folded our laundry, he took me on the slide - there was nothing he couldn't do. my grandma would sit on the couch and have tea-parties with us or sing to us, but it was my grandfather who would hoist us over his shoulder and put us on the top of the slide, or reach up and carry us down when we occasionally panicked. the two of them were just a part of my house. when he was angry he could bellow like anything, but i don't remember him being angry at us so often. i just know that when he was even i wised up, and i was something of a snot in my early grade school years.

it never, ever occurred to me to worry about my grandpa. nothing made him cry. nothing ever frightened him. there were no stairs he couldn't climb. i think even then he would talk about when he was gone, in the annoying and abstract tone adults take when they want to communicate to you vague life lessons for 'when you're older.' like, 'when i'm gone, you'll wish you'd paid more attention to this tape i made of my organ playing', or if that failed to get your attention, 'listen! years from now that tape will be worth money!'

i say it's strange now because then i didn't realize not everyone got to have great-grandparents. people made the term sound really old, but i never found anything particularly old about either of them. for crying out loud, the man lifted more laundry baskets than i did. my grandma was a little different; she used to fret about things. i don't think she let me go down the stairs by myself till i was eight. but my grandfather? i remember telling my counselors in summer camp that if they didn't play the game i wanted to play i'd run down the block and recruit my great-grandfather to beat them up. and then being mystified by their doubled-over laughter.

there was a time when i was 12 or 13, a brief, brief window of time, when i was old enough to communicate with them as people rather than guardians and they were not yet so old as to have lost any of the capabilities they had when i was young. these are the days that i will probably always have in my mind when i think of my great-grandparents. i used to go over to visit them on shabbos afternoons, usually by myself, climb up to their apartment over my regular grandparents. my grandma would be sitting on that awful green couch, looking through coupons with a magnifying glass. my grandfather would be reading the paper in his stiff armchair. and i would sit in the space between them, on the couch next to my grandma. and i'd just probe one tiny bit - "grandpa, did you read the article about the-" and he'd go off on a complete and informed tirade about something, while my grandmother tried to steer the conversation back to something she actually cared about. they'd get out picture books and she'd clip my bangs with bobby pins like the hairdresser she'd been and my grandfather would recite jokes straight out of bob hope's 1960's-era autobiography with the communist yellow binding.

or i'd come on a weekday or something like thanksgiving and find him in the back bedroom with his organ - his "fun machine" - playing a tune which quite frankly sounded ghastly to me. i would sit there myself many times when i got bored downstairs, frustrated with the keys; i could never get any sound out of the bottom half, where he could make flutes and violins and hawaiin guitars (even though they all sort of sounded the same with your eyes closed.)

i think i was in tenth grade when my great-grandparents moved into the nursing home. it happened overnight. he had a stroke that left him with some speech problems, which i don't hear much in his talk anymore, and a bad leg he still can't walk much on, a bad arm; my grandmother, never an easy-going woman, could not be left to herself, and her arthritis was pretty bad. their move to the home stunned me at first, and then, when i saw for myself over repeated visits that being in a facility hadn't really changed who they were, my alarm lessened. okay, so he couldn't walk so good. still, you'd have had to be an idiot to pick a fight with my grandfather. nobody was going no place.

i don't know if you want to consider it luck that i was already away in college when my grandmother began slipping away. every time i came back she would be slightly more confused, slightly more sleepy, slightly more deaf. out of all us kids, she retained her recognition of me and the boys the longest because i think we'd been part of her world for longer, and she could touch my curly hair and know me at once, and then she'd talk to me. but that was a different kind of talking. i watched my grandmother become a little girl again, come down to the simplest and brightest emotions - "you're so beautiful!" "i'm so happy!" - and then fade away. for years i didn't speak to my grandfather very much because whenever i visited, i spoke to my grandmother. i remember thinking vaguely that my grandfather was alright and he'd understand, but she needed to see me and hold my hand.

and then, you know, there's new york, and school, and work, and the things you worry ceaselessly about when you lose perspective of things. months went by when i didn't speak to either of them. i made it home the day before my grandmother died, but i didn't see her. my father still says that that's probably a good thing.

but anyway, as i said, her funeral woke something up inside of me. my grandfather cried. after 67 years of marriage, of course he cried, but somehow i didn't want him to. i didn't want him to cry. i didn't want him to not be able to get up the steps to my grandparents' house, the steps i watched him go up a million times with no problem when i was a kid.

and that realization has only grown when i talk to him on the phone on sundays. it has taken 18 years, but slowly, i am realizing that nobody is made of steel. and it terrifies me.

thank G-d, my grandfather's alright now. usually when i'm speaking to him and he says, 'what? i can't hear you,' it's because my cell phone, whose battery is not nearly as long as my grandfather's, has given up the ghost after thirty-six whole minutes off the charger. but even though i know this, it always leaves me with a sudden spark of panic. for the first time, i see my great-grandfather as something fragile and tenuous, though he gives me only the faintest signs of weakness.

we have more in common than you'd think. we both live in facilities of some kind. we compare the food and have a kind of loser's competition over who eats worse (i'm winning). we talk about my classes and my friends and his friends and his classes that he took in high school or that my mother took or even my grandfather. everything kind of runs together. i have found lately that i can't get off the phone with him, even when i know i should, that i must be wearing him out.

i just want him to stay the way he is, who he is, forever, and always be just a phone call away. but that's the thing about being a great-granddaughter and not just a regular one - you tend to come in a little late in the action. and it's normal for people to leave you a little bit at a time in their old age; we usually think of it as one of the happiest endings a person could have. but i feel like it's not fair. a little part of my brain is sitting in that theater going, 'hey, listen! i'm going to be here awhile, i got a lot ahead of me! stick around!'

in the meanwhile, when i get off the phone with him lately, i'm like this. i am happy to have the grandfather i've always had, this man who is a cornerstone of my family, who has seen two or three or depending on how you count them five world wars, who was there before all of us yet still shoots the breeze with me over my teenage angst for however long i want.

if comic books could come true, i would have one of those freeze-guns or crystal tanks all the evil supervillains always seem to have, where they can preserve the people they love for all time. but i guess life was never meant to be that way.

the funny thing is that he still thinks i'm calling for his sake.