Forever a Foreigner

It’s strange. Everyone else seems to be full of words to say about him, but I can’t describe him or his life. I can’t sum it up, and I can’t try. I can only write about me, the me that touched him every now and then.

I am his first grandchild. He was the first one to discover my nickname there in my initials, S.A.M., and he discovered it right away.    

I remember his voice, coming out of the plastic end of a black receiver, tiny and distant. That was where he was, he and Nana, in the unknown at the other end of the phone. We—Mom, Dad, my siblings, and I—had to make a special trip to the computer shop to hear them. We sat in one of the phone booths, at the back, while monks in orange robes and shaved heads sat learning English at computers at the front. I remember Mom’s strange excitement, the way she told us that we were going to talk to Granddad and Nana, her delight as she cradled the phone in her hand and talked eagerly into it. The voices in the receiver belonged to them, and they said that they loved me, above the noise of the printers and the motorcycles going by outside in the street.

On my birthday–or after, or before–whenever it reached us from across the sundering seas, came a card from America. It was always signed: Love, Granddad and Nana. I kept them all.

Later, when technology went through its grand metamorphoses, there were video calls. I was shy of the camera, and I found it boring to sit still and hear the news from a place so far away—but they called, every week, and I knew that they cared.

But we were not always on the other side of the world. Their house was the one place in America that I knew best, and the only one that I missed when we went back across the sea. I did not know much of America, and the parts I saw I thought I disliked, but Granddad took me into his America, and I learned it like a new story.

He took me with him to work, always somewhere different, a house, a shop, a shed, but always in his white work truck with the tools all over the backseat. He put a paint brush in my hand, and he gave me a roller, and I learned how to “cut” the edges of a wall and how to paint smooth strokes and not leave any streaks. I learned about live wires and took apart pipes under a sink with a wrench. I used a nail gun and hooked up trailers. But more than any of that, I listened to him talk to people, and I learned the quiet art of listening to slow, easygoing speech about farms and people and the small things of life.

Later, I wrote a book set in a small southern town. People have praised me for its accuracy to the real thing, and how did I know if I never grew up in one? Well, he was my door to that world, and I followed him in.  

His office was always a mess, and so were his outbuildings. You could never see the desk itself for all the papers, and the aisles of his workshop were so cluttered you could hardly walk. I liked organizing, so he paid me sometimes to sort them out. And sometimes I did it without payment. His desk was pretty much hopeless, but at least I could sort his sermon notes—every one of them written in cramped handwriting on yellow notepaper—by date. His building was easier, but it took longer. He had so many tools and things, you see, and the sawdust took forever to sweep up. At least after a week you could walk around again.  

When I was seventeen, I left home and went to live with him and Nana before college. I was finishing my senior year of homeschool, and I had a class on Ecclesiastes that he helped teach me.

When we got to chapter 12, I could not understand the passage. It was a mystery to me, but he easily unlocked the tangled words written there. It was pure poetry, and beautiful, and by then he knew many of the metaphors already from experience.  

“Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them’;
before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain,
in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few,
and those who look through the windows are dimmed, and the doors on the street are shut—
when the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low—
they are afraid also of what is high, and terrors are in the way;
the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along, and desire fails, because man is going to his eternal home, 
and the mourners go about the streets—before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern,
and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.”

When I got my learner’s permit, he made me drive him everywhere, to church, to the store, to the restaurants. Eventually, when I had my license, it became a habit, and I never let him drive.

We would drive up Main Street, and he would name all the buildings that he had painted. He told me one day in great detail how a car engine works. Every word went in one ear and fell out the other, but I liked him telling me.

He told me stories about his childhood, about his mother, and stories about Vietnam. We sat together in the waiting rooms of VA doctor’s offices while TVs ran in the background.

“I’ve probably told this story to you before,” he would say from the passenger’s seat of his grey Ford.

“I can always hear it again,” I’d answer. If I’d had a perfect memory, I would have known all the secrets of the county.

The first time I got stopped by a policeman to check my credentials, he distracted the deputy by asking after his mother.  

He had a passion for eating out. “Where do you want to eat, SAM?”

“Oh no,” I’d groan, and brace myself for a long impasse where I wanted to eat wherever they wanted to eat, and they wanted to eat wherever I wanted to eat.   

Mexican was often the outcome. Or someplace that served shrimp.

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There is a heavy staff I have, curiously shaped and knotted, and stained dark brown. Its twisted end is painted gold, and there are marbles sunk into the wood. He made it with his own hands and christened it my “Gandalf staff”. I don’t know how I could bring it with me to Cambodia, but I must try.

I also have his hunting knife, with its curved blade and leather sheath. It comes with me wherever I go to live, and, after the modern tradition of hunting, I use it to cut open the packages I lure to my address.

I went through my papers recently, and I found the elegy for his friend Willard. He had written it himself—perhaps one of the last beautiful things he had been able to write. He and Willard used to keep up correspondence, writing letters to one another. He’d bragged on me to Willard, sharing some of my own writing, and Willard wrote back to him a letter praising my work, and then he sent the praise on to me.

I went with him to visit Willard, when Willard was on his deathbed. I did not know then that I would visit him on his own deathbed in a few years.

I went to college, and my visits grew infrequent. Time passed. He and Nana moved to Greenville, and I went to Cambodia for a year. Then I came back and stayed with them again. Much had changed during those years, but some things had stayed the same.   

I went downstairs for my morning coffee a few months ago, and there by the hot pot was a note that said, Eggs Up Grill? So we went out to breakfast like we always used to, and I asked the lady to seat us away from the door so that he could hear, and he ordered his eggs (over easy), his grits (buttered and salted), and his toast (grilled dark). I put his cane next to me and passed him the Splenda and jam. He talked about his loneliness and made comments about the last thing I had written. We got ready to head out again.

“Here’s your cane.”

“Thanks, Sammy-girl.”  

He liked to watch movies, and though our tastes differed a great deal, we could meet on certain sci-fi films. He was always asking me to find another good one, which was hard to do. The last one I watched with him was his favorite.

I remember his voice, coming out of the speaker on my iPhone as he called me from the hospital on one of his good days. I told him little things, little news and the doings of people, the sorts of things he liked to hear.

I hung up on him by accident and called him back to say goodbye properly.

“I love you, Granddad,” I said.

“Love you, SAM.”