Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Books, Box Wine and Photographs of yonder years

I used to be scared of my grandfather. I was terrified of him. He was a very imposing man, a very quiet man, a man who kept to his own company, and I tended to stay out of his way. Unlike Granny Ellen, I don’t have many childhood memories with my grandfather. I also never really had a nickname for him – my grandmothers were Granny Ellen and Granny Faye, my grandfather on my dad’s side was Biba (pronounced Bee-buh), but my mom’s dad? I tried out Grandpa or Grandad George, but neither of them really worked, so I ended up not having a nickname for him.

There is one memory that I do have of my grandfather from when I was very young though, one that I think was blown out of proportion considering how young I was. Pre-school had finished for the day, and my mom was late picking me up. All of my friends had left and all the teachers had left. I was all alone in the playground at the top of the jungle gym and it felt like I had been there for hours and hours. I was crying because I thought that my mom had forgotten about me, that I had been abandoned, and then my grandfather arrived, sweeping me into his arms – my hero, my saviour. As I said, looking back with hindsight, I am sure that my memory of the event has been exaggerated by age – I am sure that there was a teacher watching me from inside and I am sure that it wasn’t the hours of loneliness I had imagined. Half an hour, maybe. An hour max. Hours?? Not likely.

As I grew older, as I started school, learned to read and started understanding more about the world around me, my grandfather and I grew closer. I remember him showing me the photo albums from the days gone by – photos of the family that I would never know, photos of him as a little boy, of my mother as a little girl slowly growing older until the photos of her wedding day. And that is when his photos stopped. I always wanted more. It got to a point where I would ask granddad to show me those photo albums at least once a week.

When I reached high school and became technologically advanced, my grandfather and I bonded even further as I taught him how to use his cellphone, how to SMS and how to make calls even though he was practically deaf at this stage and making phone calls was not really an option for him. He wanted to know anyway, and we would get phone-calls on occasions when he was worried about something where he would say what needed to be said, assume that we had heard and hang up. Not ideal, but it worked well enough!

When I went to University and started studying English, we bonded over books – he tried to convert me to Charles Dickens, but shared my horror at the prospect of studying Hard Times. “The worst one!” He announced, with a look of absolute disgust on his face. Needless to say, his response to the book did not endear me towards it. When I would visit during the holidays, his face lit up to see me, and we had written conversations with each other.

There are a couple of things that will always remind me of my grandfather – whenever I see a crossword, I will always think of the way he did them daily, insisting that they kept him sane; whenever I see a box of wine, I think of the glass that he insisted on having daily, even up to a month before he passed away; and whenever I hear the words RAF, I see the photographs that lined his albums and his walls, the photographs of his troupe and of his friends and the letter of thanks that took a place on prominence on the wall.

My grandfather was a proud man, and I hope to live my life in a way that would have made him proud to have me as a granddaughter.

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