Heritage

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If by some miracle I fathered a childthen that child would never know his great-grandparents. He wouldn'tknow Abraham Lincoln either so that might not come as a big surprise.But my point is that he would not know people who were instrumentalin his own existence and formative to my own.
I drove both of my grandfather's cars.They preferred larger 8 cylinder cruisers with power windows andblue or brown interiors. Neither of them owned as much as a socketset. Their cars smelled like baby powder and aftershave. Their wordsas we cruised down the street were casual references to my beard, jobprospects and girlfriends.

My mother's father, Sam, rubbed hisknee replacement while he drove with a hand covered by white hair onthe knuckles, his blue polyester slacks binding at the thigh. He worepatent leather loafers and white socks and button up short sleeveshirts with a white tank top underneath. He wore silver dollar bolo ties and didn't think that was unusual. He had a way of working thesteering wheel like it was a ship's anchor line that needed turning.That was a sturdy steering wheel, by the way, strong, indestructible.It's probably still out there somewhere!"Well, Oggy, you won't get richdoin' nothin'. Clothes a mess...face all a hairy. Boy-o-boy!"His tone, a toothy New England farmfolk slang, said it all, that I was hardly worth lecturing with mygirl hair length and fake frame glasses and flowery tank top shirtwith nothing to cover it."Good looking boy like you hidingbehind all that hair? Look, there's a barber. How about it? I'llpay!"Never mind that this grandfather hadlost his hair by the time he was thirty so the option of growing amane like mine was never one to choose. I would nod because when heframed the topic thusly I really had no rebuttal. He had enjoyedtaking photographs and one picture he took of our house in Maine willforever represent an idea and image I have of my early childhood. Icould have argued that like his interest in photography had bornfruit, I too had amateur designs on a life as a writer and my firstassignment to myself was to read. But raising the lofty example ofHermann Hesse or Jack Kerouac would have been futile so I was contentto listen to the talk radio station and watch the college studentsmerrily march their books to class. Our big blue Oldsmobile thundereddown the street under my grandfather's sure hand. I'd say he was 83at the time and we were on our way to visit his wife in the long-termcare facility. He made me banana pancakes for lunch with maple syrupand butter and considered it the height of acceptable gluttony. Hiswife liked playing scrabble and getting postcards from her daughters.She didn't drive at all from what I could remember.
The last time I drove with my father'sfather, Bob, the source of my middle name, it was down a tree linedcorridor in the college town of his adult life. I was certain wewould crash because he was genuinely oblivious to other drivers,pedestrians, obstacles, stop signs, lights, cats, everything. Hesquinted through his glasses and muttered with grumpy dissuasion.He'd had a stroke some years earlier and a man of few words became aman of no words. He was probably 92 years old and we weregoing to fill a prescription at the drug store."Stop sign!" I blurted as weglided through a four way stop.He muttered while I gripped the doorhandle.His wife had been the talker of thefamily...her elocution and mannerisms borrowed from KatherineHepburn. Bob was the keeper of the cigarettes, the guy bringing inmore wood to the fireplace."School?" He askedtentatively as he had long abandoned my fate to the Gods.My college career had beendisillusioning so I'd decided to take some time for independentstudy. I summed this up by saying, "One day. But latelyI'm reading.
I emphasized this last word like he washard of hearing, but he wasn't. His lack of voice command made methink he couldn't understand words either."Bullshit!" he said andmuttered something to the effect that this was blowing smoke up hisass and that I was malingering. I tossed my hands up futilely,surrendering. I had to save my strength up for real arguments with myfather about the nature of violence and the effect hunger strikeshave on world affairs. My two sets of grandparents lived inthe same small town for most of their lives, a detail that isn'tcommon and is becoming less common as biology and chemistry becomeless reliant on sociology.
If my son were born I would tell himhis grandparents live in Australia and Holland and I'd need a map ofthe entire planet to show him where those places are. Mygrandparents, on the other hand, lived in the same zip code andprobably shopped at the same grocery store and had their paperdelivered by the same paper boy. I could find both their houses on asingle town map. More importantly, I'm thinking of the lack ofemotional connection my child would have with his predeceasedgreat-grandparents. Most of us don't know who our great-grandparentsare so we can all relate. We come into the world and can only hearthe echoes of their voices in the behavior patterns of ourgrandparents, whom we hardly give a second thought to until they dieor are stricken or send us large Christmas checks, and in the barelycontained battle our parents wage for control. It's already laid out,our genetic infrastructure, and the architects are dead. We drivethrough town oblivious to the stop signs and intersections theypreviously paved, plowing through the fields they planted and parkingon their flower beds.