Whatever Held

I had two grandfathers, and they were about as different as two men can be.

My dad’s dad was a truck driver. His world was small and warm and complete: his chair, his miniature poodle, a cold can of beer, the ballgame coming in on the radio, a deck of cards. He didn’t need much beyond that, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, he made room for me. He taught me to play cards. He taught me, without ever saying it was a lesson, the importance of a good nickname. He called me Homer for most of my childhood, and I think it was because he loved baseball, and that was reason enough. He was my friend, plainly and simply. We watched television together for hours, and while we did, I’d dress his little poodle up in doll clothes and push him around the house in a toy buggy, and that dog and that man both let me do it without complaint.

My mom’s dad was the opposite of all that, and exactly the same underneath. He was quiet and humble, a college graduate and an engineer, a man who thought in numbers. He’d bring me dolls back from the places his life took him, and I still remember my favorites: the Hawaii dolls, the Eskimo dolls, the Asian dolls, a whole small collection of somewhere-elses handed to a little girl who hadn’t gone anywhere yet. He was active in a way my other poppy wasn’t, always moving, golf and bowling and bike rides he’d take me along on. He’d teach me complicated math problems just for the pleasure of it and then quiz me on them, delighted when I got them. And he had a house in the Oakland hills with a one car garage and a driveway that sloped way, way down. He would sit me on his lap in the car at the top of that slope and let me “drive” it into the garage, my hands on the wheel and his hands really doing the work, and I felt like I was steering the whole world into place.

One man had a truck route and a radio. The other had an engineering degree and a slide rule. One filled his days with a ballgame and a poodle. The other filled his with bike routes and math. If you’d described them to me as strangers, I’d never have guessed they’d raise a granddaughter who felt exactly the same way in both their houses. But I did. Because for all the ways they were nothing alike, they gave me the identical thing, and it was the thing I needed most. They let me be myself. Both of them. I could mess up their hair and they’d let me. I could be ornery, loud, silly, too much, and neither of them tried to file me down into something quieter or easier. I spent enormous stretches of my childhood at their houses, and at both of them I got to simply exist as the kid I actually was, with no complaint and no correction. That was not a thing I found everywhere. It was a thing I found there.

And there was something else I watched at both houses without knowing I was learning it. They were good to their wives. Both of them, in their different registers, gentle and steady and devoted to the women they’d married. I saw, early and from two directions, what it looked like when a man loved someone well. I didn’t have words for it then. I just knew those houses felt safe, and I know now that a good part of why was the way those two men treated the people they loved.

Both of them fought in World War II. Neither of them talked about it much, at least not to me. I think about that sometimes now, more than I did as a kid: that these two men had been through something enormous, something most of us can’t imagine, and what they turned around and offered a little granddaughter was a deck of cards and a math quiz
and a poodle to dress up and a lap to sit on. Whatever they carried, they set it down long enough to let me be silly in their living rooms. I don’t know that I fully appreciated, until I was much older, how much that must have taken.

I think about them both, still. The truck driver who made me Homer and taught me cards. The engineer who let me steer the car down into the garage. Two completely different men who, between them, gave a quiet, watchful, too sensitive little girl the same quiet gift, over and over, for years: you are fine exactly as you are, and you are safe here. They were the first men, and probably last, who ever made me feel that way. I’ve been grateful for it my whole life.