Grandad

I know so few of my grandfather’s stories –

Not because he wasn’t telling them then,

But because I took twenty years, at least,

To understand how brief

The terms of everybody’s rent,

And didn’t listen.

But I know that

Before he gripped in his skinny hands

My father’s and brother’s,

(I was out of the room),

And sang Amazing Grace

And professed new faith 

On shrunk lips,

And – left;

Before he lived, retired,

Near other snowbirds in a plastic shelled house

In the yard with the ants and the fascinating threat

Of hurricanes, and better,

An alligator

We were not to throw oranges at

When it slunk up out of the lake for the sun,

Before he was gap-toothed Grandad with the deep, deep tan

So complete it negated the decades of winters

He’d seen in old Allentown,

O Holy Night Allentown, its Christmases white –

We spent one with them, with him and his

Pennsylvania Dutch second wife

Who had her own grandchildren

and liked them very much,

And saw the Alps and said:

They were very nice –

After he’d learned to order drei Bier

at the Front, dabbling in war,

but before

all the rest,

He was Jack, insurance man,

Husband to Jackie, father to Judy

And Jon,

Who remembers him, 

Laughing downstairs with their friends; 

The ladies’ high heels gumming slightly on linoleum,

Lipsticked mouths tasting treats Jon had eyed,

Stockpiled all week in the fridge, forbidden;

The men swirling – martinis,

I imagine, this being the 50’s;

Before he was Grandad, he was

Pipe-smoking, Tolkien-loving, gap-toothed Jack,

Cracking puns just for the halibut.