“I don’t know why things happen the way they do,” Grandpa Larry says, leaning against the ladder that separates him from me, “And sometimes you just have to ask ‘why?’ Why’d your dad have to be one of them to go?”
I had been holding a light bulb in my hand that Grandpa Larry just took out of my kitchen ceiling, a job I am too short to do on my own and too cheap to buy a tool for. Somewhere in the midst of this conversation, I had to set the bulb down on the counter before I accidentally let it slip through my fingers and shatter all over the floor.
This was immediately one of those moments when you’re not sure if you’re nauseous because you’re dizzy, or vice-versa. Some people get chills, some people fear the revisiting of their most recent meal. All I could do was adjust my glasses (something that has become a nervous tick of sorts) and shrug my shoulders, pushing the lump down in my throat that had appeared along with the nausea, “I don’t know.” I said.
I don’t know. I really don’t. That’s like asking why God chose the color blue when he created the sky, when he could’ve made it purple and let the ecosystems thrive under a shade of violet or lavender. Everything could be named “Sky Purple” instead of “Sky Blue,” a color that so many of us associate with sadness. Why would God allow us to cry to Blues songs or “get the blues” when something so stunningly beautiful as a blue sky exists? Have you heard the cry-in-your-beer Bluegrass songs? “Blue” is exactly how they make me feel.
We could have “Sky Purple” crayons, and I could have a dad who is still alive. The lakes and rivers could have a purple tint to them, and an abusive father could die of a heart attack before he ever lays a hand on his child again. Why not? I don’t know.
I picked the lightbulb back up and held it in my hands, moving the conversation from a highly emotional subject back to how many watts the bulb is, and whether or not I should just bring it to the hardware store with me.
But Grandpa Larry is in a rare mood this visit, and he brings the subject of my Dead Dad up once again: “You reminded me so much of Keith whenever we were digging that hole today.”
My father was a big fan of a saying from a refined, well-known, world-renowned man. This man is a philosopher of sorts to some parts of the world. He would often say this phrase, whether it was as a joke or as a method of frustrating me into doing something I had no prior motivation to do: “Get ‘er done.” As some may know, this refined man with this refined saying is Larry the Cable Guy. If you aren’t familiar with this saying, please use your nearest search engine to find a video of him saying it, and then, imagine a man who went by Keith saying the same words in the same accent.
This “get ‘er done” attitude is something I always knew my dad to have. If there was a job to be done, he wanted to finish it before the next day if at all possible. He wanted to do it well, but he didn’t want to doddle around. This, most likely, is why I was stubbornly digging a hole for a baby citrus tree at seven o’clock on a Saturday morning as my mom was reminding me that I just paid a small fortune in chiropractic bills.
Later that day after the hole-digging and the lightbulb unscrewing, we headed to Lowe’s to pick up a replacement bulb. Whereas Dad was notorious for that attitude of his, his father-in-law, Grandpa Larry, is notorious for finding “a friend” in any place we go. Grandpa Larry, who visits from 300 miles south of my city, manages to strike up a conversation with any willing (or sometimes unwilling) participant. This conversation happened to fall to the political side very quickly, and like any good Lowe’s worker would, the kind man conversed with the taller, older man wearing an Army National Guard Veteran hat whose granddaughter was standing awkwardly to the side and reading the back of the lightbulb box.
“There were a lot of people drafted into Vietnam from this area around here,” Grandpa Larry was explaining to this man who I will call James. “Lots of people killed in Vietnam, too. I was seventeen when I signed up for the guard,” Grandpa Larry continued, leaning his hands on the James’ cart, “And then I got out in ‘63, and by ’67, I was having a hard time finding a job anywhere.”
As he was explaining, I was reading less of the lightbulb box and perking my ears up, enjoying when he talks about his younger years. The man is a riot, and he has lots of good stories, especially from the time he was in the Guard.
“I told my wife one weekend,” he said, referring to my grandma who, at the time, was home with two children, “I said, ‘On Monday, I want you to take me down to the office and I’m going to re-enlist.’”
I can only imagine the pain Grandma must have felt the rest of that weekend, knowing that he would be leaving her again. In 1961, she had been dating him only a short time before he left for basic training the first time, and she’s mentioned how it hurt for him to leave her without Grandpa Larry asking her to wait for him to come back. Fast-forward to when the Vietnam War was really firing up in 1967, I wonder if the pain was worse with an eight-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter or if she, like so many, was able to numb herself to it.
Grandpa Larry took his hands off James’ cart and stood up straight, “So we went down to the office on Monday around noon, and I went up to the door,” he explained, and I notice a little bit of a mischievousness in his tone so I look at him and see that he’s grinning now. I know how this story ends, but I’ve never heard him tell the full line of events, “And there was a sign on the door that said ‘Closed on Mondays.’”
He gave a little laugh, and James might have been wondering if this story was going to end well. I knew it did, I had the advantage on the sweet Lowe’s man. “I got a call later that day around 4:30 from a guy wanting to hire me, and I went to work right after.”
I’d never heard that story before, but I got that nauseated-dizzy feeling again.
Instead of Grandpa Larry standing in my kitchen today, asking why things happen the way they do, would he have just been represented to me in a folded-up flag on someone’s mantel somewhere? Would the United States government have had to send someone to tell a young wife in the 60s that her husband wasn’t coming back home? Would I have had to dig a citrus-tree-hole by myself and find a way to unscrew the lightbulb in my tall kitchen ceilings?
Why do things happen the way they do? I don’t know. I do know, though, that I am glad the sky isn’t purple.
Comments