Back home from grandmother's

This weekend I went to visit my grandmother. It still feels weird being there without my grandfather. I missed him a lot this weekend for some reason. More so than usual anyways. I'm not really sure why, but he was on my mind a lot.

I'm always afraid to mention him around my grandmother or to watch anything on TV about dying. I don't want to see her cry.

We were talking about him in the car ride home though. I think maybe it's because Thanksgiving is getting close. And he would always say the prayer before the meal. I didn't get to see him the Thanksgiving before he passed because I was in Wroxton. Just Christmas. And then in February .. that was it.

I can still remember the deliberate way he talked, the way his hands would shake all the time. He would make up stories for my sister and I, like "Gogo the cat", the animal actor who was so amazing that he could play dogs like Toto in the Wizard of Oz. I remember the time we went out walking with him and I tripped and scraped my hands and knees, and I didn't cry or anything and he was really proud of me. I remember he would take us out to the movies or out to eat, but he'd always say "the girls took me out to eat", despite the fact that he drove and he paid for everything. And for my eighth grade confirmation, I needed to do community service so I helped him deliver meals on wheels. This one woman talked to me for fifteen minutes about this huge doll collection she had displayed in her living room. And we climbed back into the car and as we drove away, my grandfather explained how some of the people we delivered to really just were lonely and wanted someone to stop by to talk to.

My grandmother is lonely now. She always wants us to visit. When we leave, she hobbles with her cane down the hallway to the back room. You can see her little face watching us leave through the window.

Even though I saw him for so much of my childhood, there was so little that I knew about him. There's things I'm only finding out now, like the fact that he visited Japan during the Vietnam war for R&R. It would have been nice to know him as an adult, instead of through the eyes of a child. I wish I could have heard stories about his life... from him. Not necessarily about the war, since I don't think he liked to talk about that. But about his childhood.

Well that's all for now, I need to go to bed. Work tomorrow.