It's a pitiful habit when a writer digs into their stash of completed works and republishes something. The generally accepted rule on this is, Don't! Well, i think you would all agree that when it comes to rules i would be forthright in saying i take what i like and disregard the rest. Then again, i believe that most of us do in some form or fashion.
I have been working quite a bit on a piece of length lately and after the summer I've had haven't really felt too much like writing anything that wasn't germain to the project. Here again, with the crappy summer I've been having most of what i have written in the last five weeks is way too angry and way too off voice for this project and will get thrown into the prompt bin for when i can't seem to find anything to write about. I think one of his kids finally just set fire to the last couple hundred boxes of notes and sentences that Hemingway had scratched out and thrown into his slush bucket. Personally, i hope I'm coherent enough to burn all that crap before i die so that no one has to wonder what i was thinking. Some days it's hard enough for me to figure out if it was something reality based or total fiction. I guess that's why Raymond Carver said that everything he wrote was fiction and nothing he wrote was fiction. I am certainly on board with the concept.
While I've been working on this project it has brought back memories that i have had stashed away for years. Many of these memories revolve around my life with my Grandparents. It occurred to me that in days passed i would go to them for advice, or just to talk, or any of a number of other reasons; they would have been considered my support system. At least a great part of that system. This Friday, July 17 is and always shall be my Grandfather's birthday and while he isn't here to celebrate it with, maybe i can share some of my Grandparents with all of you and in turn maybe one of you will learn something about the special nature of the relationship between a grandparent and a grand child. I thank you for taking the time to read this and truly hope you get something from it.
Oh how i miss them, Be Well, Dave
Amistad in august, first appeared in the "Northwoods Journal", Fall, 1998. Reprinted here as is my right being the original author of same.
Amistad in August
I was taken back to a special place and time when the wind was hot, the water glistened and the doubted words of an old man became truth.
All of my life, people have given me the same advice, “work hard, so you can play hard.” As a child, I didn’t understand what this meant, all I knew was I never got to play as hard as I worked. There was always some chore that needed my immediate attention. Being the oldest of three, it seemed to be my responsibility to make sure the chores got done. I had chores at my grandparents’ house. However, their chores were more educational than physical. So in an effort to keep from having to pull up the goathead stickers in my parent’s yard, I found reasons to visit my grandparents. Actually, I made an art form out of finding ways to get out of pulling weeds.
As with most kids, I enjoyed visiting my grandparents. They were not in the habit of giving me gifts but the one thing I did receive was plenty of understanding. My grandparents had a photography business for many years. From an early age, I was instructed in the theories and practices of good photography. I learned what it takes to make a good picture bad and to make a good picture great. My grandfather had a great sense of humor. He found humor in some of the strangest places, usually at someone else’s expense. He really enjoyed being a clown and putting on an act. It never seemed to matter who was around, he would break into some act like putting his lit cigarette into his ear and walking around with his tongue stuck out.
His humor was a great source of comfort for me. Using humor as a tool he taught me about nature and weather. My grandfather was one of the first meteorologists, as we understand the science today, and an avid reader.
One day while fishing off of spur 406 just west of Del Rio, Texas, I made a discovery. My grandfather and I were discussing weather patterns and what is called the dry line when something on the bank caught my eye. I sat up in my seat on the boat and said, “Hey Papa, look!! That has got to be the biggest rat in the world.”
Under a swig from his scotch and soda and an overdone gravely belch my grandfather said, “That is a nutria.” In the past he had given some really far out and unbelievable answers to questions, but this answer was too much. For years I took him at his word whether or not, I believed him. In response to nutria, I just sat there drowning my worm while sweat beads ran together and rolled down my back.
The sun shone off of the glass surface of the lake as if we were only a mile from the sun. The blistering heat and stillness of the day was periodically interrupted by the occasional chill of a slight breeze. Again I thought nutria, it must be Latin for good food and just giggled to myself. The longer I thought about it the funnier, “nutria” got and I wanted to ask him if he was pulling my leg but still I said nothing. I just sat there respectfully listening to him tell me about the uses people around the world had for nutria pelts. He explained to me in great detail how people in South America made their living from the trapping and sales of these hides. He was willing to bet half of all the cowboy hats in Texas were made of nutria felt rather than beaver, despite what the labels were printed with. He felt most of the buyers were ignorant to the differences between the qualities of nutria and beaver fur. In his opinion the nutria’s pelt was far superior to the beaver’s. The hairs were thicker and softer than the beaver’s and they had a far superior sheen to them.
After listening rather flippantly to my grandfather’s version of the plight of the nutria for what seemed to be all afternoon, he told me to pull in the anchor and we’d head for shore. Shore was really where I wanted to be. It was just too hot out on the water.
Back on shore, under the shade of the live oak and black locust trees that surrounded our campsite I was still bothered by the nutria. More so, I was ready for a coke, with ice, and a cigarette. I would usually steal one of my grandfather’s and a match and make up some excuse to get away from my grandparents to smoke, like going down by the water for a look around.
Down by the water I found some clams and watched the minnows swim in and out rhythmically with my shadow being cast upon the water. The clams were always fairly abundant. There were some live ones but mostly just the half shells left in the wake of an armadillo’s or, according to my grandfather, a nutria’s supper. After all of the stories my grandfather told me, including the life cycles of thunder storms, satellites with one hundred minute orbits, and learning to measure the height of a tree while standing on my grandparents’ porch, something had started eating at me about how one guy could know so much about everything.
After finishing my cigarette, I walked back to our campsite. Along the way, I heard a mocking bird chattering away at a wood pecker. I stopped for a minute to watch. I got so caught up in this wild conversation of screech and rata-tat-tat that an armadillo had walked up and brushed my leg. Instantly I looked down. I was fearful that it was a snake. Western diamondbacks and cottonmouths were found regularly in the park. When I looked down, I saw an armadillo and it startled me so badly that I took off running. An armadillo was not what I expected. I expected to see a snake, but no, just a damn little armadillo. Frantically, I ran back to our camp and forgot about challenging my grandfather’s nutria story.
Later that evening while watching the whippoorwills come in to feast on the early evening bugs as the first stars came over the horizon, my grandmother came out to the pier where I was fishing. To keep from being too disrespectful, I asked her what those forty pound rats were I had seen earlier in the day. She looked me dead in the eye and said, “So you don’t believe your grandfather?”
I said, “Well uh, yeah. Uh no, uh.” She always had a way of cutting through the fog and bringing out the light of day.
My grandmother said, “Why don’t you ask him if he’s pulling your leg or if he’s telling you the truth?”
For a time, my grandmother and I fished from the pier. When my grandfather came down to the pier, he was putting on this act of rattling ice cubes in his customary glass of Scotch and making goofy faces and other antics while playing with his lit cigarette. It was quite vaudevillian. He asked me if I had caught a Guinness fish yet. I was really reluctant to answer because I didn’t know what a Guinness fish was and was afraid that the whole out of doors would laugh at me for being ignorant. My grandfather bent down making this exaggerated groaning noise and lifted the fish basket out of the water and said, “Nope, no Guinness fish here.”
I thought to myself, I know there are no Guinness fish in there. All I had were two blue cats about a pound each. So he dropped the basket back into the water and took a seat on the ice chest between my grandmother and me. For a time there was peace. The only thing that could be heard were the crickets, the breeze, and an occasional fish jumping from the water to catch a celestial fire fly.
That was the last fishing trip my grandparents and I ever took together. My grandfather and I made two or three trips after that by ourselves, but it just wasn’t the same without my grandmother. The three of us were getting older. As for the Nutria, I never did challenge my grandfather’s answer or the natural history lesson that came along with the finer points of nutria felt.
Some years later while watching television, constantly flipping from one scene to the next, something in the back of my mind stopped the activity in my hand on one of those public broadcast stations. My own son said, “Look, Dada, a beaver.”
I said, “No, Son, it is a nutria.” My grandfather’s words from years past came floating in to my television set and repeated the lesson, nearly word for word, on more time.
An amazing thing happened that night, I was taken back to a special place and time when the wind was hot, the water glistened, and the doubted words of an old man became truth. The clouds in my eyes began to build like the giant thunderstorms in the high desert of my youth and the height of that tree we measured, seemed justified. I looked at my son and said, “Hey boy, work hard, so you can play hard.”
