Hallelujah, By and By

The drive from south Miami to Orlando to see Grampa and Granny takes a few hours. In most of the pictures I see of me and my Grampa, I am doing something with him. We are playing with blocks: I love building things, and he is a self-taught artist, so it works out. I remember playing baseball in his backyard, and the times he lets us ride on his lawnmower or in the trailer behind it. I walk into his garage while he and my dad are working on our red Dodge Caravan. I have a vague recollection of either a child-oriented lecture on mechanics, or perhaps just eavesdropping on what they are saying. He comes down and helps my dad fix our house after Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

He is an average sized man, especially when standing next to my six-foot-four dad. Although, when I am a young child, he seems to be the biggest man I know. Everyone speaks well of him: as a kid with everything figured out, I know my mom has to say nice things, it is her dad. But even my dad makes it seem like he is the biggest man in the family. “When you marry a woman, you marry a family,” my father tells me on more than one occasion. I can only assume he has his father-in-law in mind when he says that.

It seems that in all my memories he looks exactly the same: He wears glasses (although he didn’t used to); His hair has always been grayish white. He is never bald, but never has a full head of hair. Even in the old pictures of him, his wife, my mom and her sister, his blonde hair, not balding, looked just like the “Grampa” I visit through the years. He laughs a deep, manly chuckle that only comes from a palpable enjoyment of life and seems to assure you whatever was just said is undoubtedly funny.

We call him “Grampa.” Not Papa, Grandad, Grandaddy, or Granpa. No, he is very specific: he wants to be called Grampa, with an “m.” I don’t know why he wants us to call him that, but we don’t mind. He never asks us to do anything unreasonable, and so as a kid it seems natural, right. As if there is some natural way the world should be, and that way includes me calling him Grampa.

Now that I think about it, he hardly asks us to do anything at all. There is the leaf-raking session every time we visited the house they moved to in the Northeast Georgia mountains, but even that was enforced by my parents, not him. The one request he regularly makes of us is not to fight with each other. The only time I ever see him cry or get angry is when I fight with my brother or sisters. He explains a concept I am reluctant to accept: how “He’ll always be your brother,” or “You’ll always have your sisters, and you need to be there for each other.”

Naturally I try to listen to what he says—my Grampa is, after all, the smartest man ever. I mean, he lived through part of the Great Depression, and World War II. I remember the first time I really understood that. I was astounded that I knew someone who was alive during a time in actual history. He shows me one of his elementary class pictures, and the one thing that strikes me is the lack of shoes. There are only a handful of children with shoes, and Grampa isn’t one of them. In the picture, he doesn’t seem to mind.

My Grampa always impresses me when I think of him, though I can’t tell you exactly what it is that impresses me. It isn’t his stint in the Army at a radio relay base in Africa during the Korean War. It isn’t the successful ownership of Professional Carpet Systems for almost a decade, during which he employed my dad between jobs. It isn’t his car phone—very prestigious to have when they pre-empted the cell phone—although as a kid this is one of the coolest things about him. He always quick adapts to new technology—the computer, internet, and e-mail—not a common feat among his peers. It’s not the multiple battles with heart issues, the quadruple bypass surgery. It isn’t even his faith: a go to church every Sunday and let God’s love show between each visit sort of faith; the kind that preachers preach about when they’re really talking about Jesus. It isn’t any of these things. It is probably all of them, and then some.

He tells me once about how one time in church when another guy had the nerve to put his arm around my Granny before she was dating Grampa. He explains how there rose up in him an incredible urge to throttle the guy. He didn’t, naturally. It was in church. My mom tells me about how he got my Granny. She was the Baptist pastor’s daughter, and their first date was to—gasp—a drive-in movie, an act comparably abominable to dancing. Sometimes I see the old 1950s couple transported to their living room: Still with the pet names and a kiss on the cheek and the occasional clasped hand.

I have a faint memory of his pipe but I may just be imagining that. My Grampa would never smoke. Except that he used to smoke cigarettes but switched to a pipe because my aunt was allergic. He quit the pipe and threw it into a sinkhole next to his house the day his father died of lung cancer. “It’s a three minute addiction,” he says once, “If you can withstand it for three minutes, it’ll go away.” I don’t smoke, so I doubt I’ll ever know if that’s really the case or if my Grampa just has extraordinary willpower. But I sure as hell am not going to pick up a habit that my Grampa tried and then quit. He is, after all, just about the smartest man ever.

As religious as Grampa is, going to visit him never feels like going to church. I’m always learning things, but never being preached at. His favorite hymn is “I’ll Fly Away.” It’s an old country church hymn about going “to a home on God's celestial shore...when this life is o’er.” I never know it is his favorite until they play it at his funeral.

My dad chokes up a little when he tells me. I don’t understand why everyone cries: he didn’t flinch in the face of death—he is escaping “like a bird from prison bars” to “a land where joy shall never end.” But they aren’t sad because it isn’t his time, or because of the tragedy of it all. They are crying because when a man as big as my Grampa passes, you mourn.

Deconstructing Childhood Construction

When your dad works for the church, your family doesn’t have much disposable income. As a kid, I rarely picked up on this—I didn’t mind eating the store brand cereals or wearing Wal-Mart clothes. What I was aware of, though, was the fact that my family didn’t get as many new toys as my friends’ families. This wasn’t a problem, but it did result in one necessity: recyclable entertainment. My personal venue for such reusable fun was my substantial collection of Legos.

The infinite combination of seemingly endless plastic blocks occupied a significant portion of my childhood. The spaceship of today was tomorrow’s race car, the next day’s superhero base, and the next week’s medieval fortress. For me, the joy was not in the imaginative battles and adventures the finally constructed sets could engage in, but in the creative process itself. I would rather have the opportunity to build one set than play with three. My brother would hastily construct a not-to-poorly designed car and then immediately begin to ask if I would play some variation of a race or demolition derby. For me, this was unthinkable! How dare he suggest I risk destroying that which I had spent such a lengthy and tedious amount of time constructing!?

The constructs I was most proud of were perfectly coordinated in structure and color; not a single Lego brick was unnecessary or out of place. I would naturally build any brand new set exactly as the instructions indicated. The longer the pieces were in my possession, however, the more likely they were to be shuffled and recycled into a new, inventive piece of sci-fi machinery, the specific engineering of which only I could explain. These prized productions would then proceed to occupy a special location on top of my dresser or bookshelf, safe from the war-mongering grip of my “less scrupulous” fellow creator.

Yet, even my carefully conceived and composed creations were eventually destroyed, if only to make way for the next great endeavor of my early engineering career. Sometimes, I wonder if I missed out a little bit. Not that I would trade the care I put into making each and every set. I have merely found myself pondering my brother’s consistent, endearing urge to just play, and mine to think and create. Maybe my 10-year-old self could construct a happy-medium bridge between the creative process and simply enjoying the participation.

Of Experience

I used to hate it when people would restrain an explanation of something to "you'll understand when it happens to you," or "someday it will make sense." But as I grow older, it seems to ring true.

So much is dependent on our experiences. Our knowledge, understanding, et cetera, our emotions, sentiments, likes and dislikes. It all has its roots in experience. Only after years of being selfish and ignorant to others' needs can you develop a thought process that includes others' interest before your own.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.--1 Corinthians 13:11

And this passage comes in the context of the "love" chapter, 1 Corinthians 13. Paul doesn't say, when I was a child, I put away childish things. I can only imagine a 4 year old who, when asked by his parents if he wanted to run around play ball, replied with a "No, that's childish--I'd rather run the figures for that board meeting tomorrow."

When you're a kid, you do kiderrific (yes, kiderrific) things because that's what you know, being a kid, after all. And I am all for kiderrificness. I act like a child all the time. Many of you can attest to that. But why is that considered wrong sometimes? Because "I should know better." Why? Because I have had the experience.

You can't expect a 4 year old to write a 5-7 page paper on the Modernist techniques displayed by T.S. Eliot in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and no more will it be common for him to think of what others want over his innate desire for running around and Kool-Aid.

But--if you are older, which I'll assume you are because you are reading a blog, then you do have the experience--and should act accordingly. I'm not speaking as someone who's got it down (my friends will concur with me on this one), but I'm thinking about it and I'm trying.

Now go have fun while loving Jesus and others, please.

Back In The Day

So, you may think I'm an awesome person for doing this, or you may think it's a little strange, but I write my Grandma Schley. My Dad's Mom. I write her letters. And she sends me cards, WalMart giftcards and now...pictures:

First off, here is my Grandma with me, back in the day. You can't see it, but I'm actually wearing some old school, little-man, red Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars. Ballin'



Then there's me with the paps. He looks young, to me at least. But then again, he hasn't changed too much. Just more facial hair and more glasses.



Now in this one I look dang professional. I wish I had a bangin' bowtie-and-suspenders combo to wear nowadays.



Those of you who have hung out with me a bit probably have seen this face before. As you can see, I have been a slave to fashion since birth:



Then there's the typical cute smile that could mean anything from "What you're doing is funny." to "You've got a surprise waiting in my pants."

A Reason For Children

There are many reasons why I am anticipating fatherhood, among the list of tax deductions, free labor and impressionable minds is this little gem:

He looks so proud that his son is so defiant of the laws of gravity...and reason.

I imagine he is thinking "look what I made."

These are both shots of Abraham Piper with his offspring. I am definitely going to follow suit with my own.

Says Abraham: "What is it about the human (male?) psyche that makes us completely confident doing things we would never trust others to do?"