I rifle through my closet for the gray lock-box where I keep the past. My army medals, a couple marathon medallions, some old love letters I’ve been meaning to toss away. I push aside the qirsh coin and photo of my dead cousin. I’m looking for my grandfather’s note.
He was a navy man. A boxer and beer-drinker, mill-worker and fixture at the local tavern. He spent time in the ports of China, fascinated by the culture. I didn’t know it back then but he experienced something I would experience later. The alienation that occurs when you go really far away and try to come back.
Sometimes going far away is a place. Other times it’s an experience. Oftentimes it’s both. Reflecting now I see he was out of place. I see it clearly. He left home, joined the navy in the aftermath of World War II, saw astounding things, visited exotic places, and returned to Oregon to find it was no longer home.
I wish I could sit with my grandfather one more time and talk to him as the man I am now. The things I would say. I love you more than wind in trees, more than Oregon beaches. I would tell him. I know why you spent so much time in taverns, numbing the dissonance created by going. I know fighting other men was you fighting yourself, and I know you stayed quiet, alone, in that old yellow chair because it’s tiring explaining to people who never understand. Some goings put you here and them over there. Not a lot you can do about that. But yeah, grandpa, it can be real lonely.
I know about loneliness. Left home at seventeen. Went from Oregon to New York to make my way. I guess I never been one to do things small. I went back home once or twice but it wasn’t ever home. Hell it wasn’t really home when it was home.
That’s just the way I guess. We moved a lot and it’s hard to call a rental a home. Hard to call my mother home. It’s okay. Now I shape the memories. Like looking at a hill in the dark and making it a dip or decline. The longer I live, more I go through, the more I put flexibility on my memories. Make em what I need em to be.
Everything was different. Moved too much to really belong anyplace and we never knew family. Guess mom didn’t like family so I didn’t know em. Just kinda ended up on the outs. And moving as a kid, well you get used to being quiet because you’ll be gone before too long. No use in making to-do when you’ll be gone soon. Plus I figured out pretty fast spotlight wasn’t the place for me. I liked being just off to the side where the lamplight ended.
At seventeen grandpa was long passed. But he would have been proud. I knew that. And on West Point graduation day he was the only one I could think about. He would have stayed real quiet and been prouder of me in his silence than everyone else with their words.
Later in life there were plenty of times I wished I had grandpa to talk to. Sometimes I tried talking to the sky but it wasn’t the same. I won’t say it made me feel worse but it didn’t make me feel any better. When I went through my divorce and all the times I sat behind bars. When I was in the hospital for trying to hurt myself. I just wanted someone to sit quietly. Be around but not say anything. People always trying to fix you with their words when you just want someone to sit in the mud beside you.
Going away and returning. First time I came home from New York, I knew I didn’t belong. Wondered if I’d ever belonged. And years later when I landed home from Afghanistan and drove home to a dark, empty house, I felt it. Like an untethered astronaut. When I wasn’t working, I drank. I thought about grandpa.
Didn’t know what I wanted, but knew I couldn’t spend my life pretending I was home when I wasn’t. For all I knew, home was buried on a horizon somewhere, but I wasn’t going to stop moving and pretend real about something that wasn’t. I couldn’t stay. Couldn’t be stuck.
Sometimes I think people are going crazy because they’ve gone and come back to a world that expects things to change, but people to stay the same. I ain’t the same no more. I don’t recognize that boy from Oregon. Nothing I wore back then fits me. Can’t feel those Oregon feelings, can’t smell those Oregon dunes. No resuscitating the past. I have to use my breath carefully for breathing life into things that want life. Deserve life.
I understand him better. Not as a boy but as a man, tired and wrecked by life. Stepping each day to the drumbeat of the never-same-river, always flowing, moving, becoming. I take my grandfather’s note from the gray lock-box. Unfold it. Examine his handwriting in pencil. Feel his pressing fingertips.
The doctor tells me I have cancer. At least I won’t have to live with it.
He was a writer too.
Roman Newell is hard at work on his debut novel — 20XX — a work in magical realism, which explores the complexities and conflicts in modern day societies amid confusing social norms, rapidly evolving technology, and impact traumas. Follow Roman’s Substack to be added to the 20XX contact list.
"People always trying to fix you with their words when you just want someone to sit in the mud beside you."
So true. So true.
This felt like someone was reading a file stored away in my brain. And then that clobbering at the end. Sad but so beautiful.