Some of My Poetry

GRAMP

Once long ago when I was 8 or 9 years old I lived in a stucco house with my Mommy, Gram and Gramp. Gram had a '41 Plymouth coupe, and she'd take me with her when she went shopping. There was plenty of room to sit next to her, but I preferred to stand up in the narrow space behind her seat or sit on the cardboard box right behind the passenger seat. Gramp never drove, and Gram used to chauffeur him around when he was healthy. But now he was dying of prostate cancer upstairs in the front bedroom, lying on blue stained sheets on top of the high bed.

Gram used to cut his fingernails with a huge pair of scissors. His nails were too thick for ordinary clippers. I liked Gramp even though he used to get mad and throw chairs around the dining room when I was mean to him or when some difficult customer stiffed him. But now he was all alone and too weak to throw chairs up in his room. I brought him pictures I made at school and asked him questions like what were his favorite colors, or why he called Gram "Besch." His favorite colors were blue and tan. and he couldn't explain why he couldn't pronounce "Bess." He seemed to enjoy my visits, and when I ran out of things to say or ask him, I'd occupy myself about the big room poking through its many drawers or making spray with Gram's adomizer. I'd peek out the window hoping to see the 10 year old beauty with the pigtail visiting her grandparents for the summer months, but summer was over and she was gone.

Sometimes Gramp would complain of being cold and I'd help him cover up, empty his blue bottle in the toilet, and then reattach it to the tube coming out of his swollen feckel. Then, I'd promise to be right back, run down to the basement, throw some coal into the furnace, and carry out the ashes. It was nice to run back up to his room and stand over the radiator, listening to it whistle and waiting for it to get hot.

The room had a particular Gramp smell: the smell he always carried with him, only it was stronger now. It was the vigorous smell of a man who didn't care to die quite yet. He was very quiet most of the time, but I could tell he was pleased when Mommy came home and played the piano downstairs. He did not smile but I thought he liked it when I marched around his bed while she played a Chopin Pollanaise.

But he died one night, and Dr. Clark came in the morning to comfort Gram and Mommy who were crying. I tried to keep the coal stove nice and warm and hold their cold hands with my always warm hands, but I didn't cry and Mommy yelled at me, "Why aren't you crying? What's wrong with you?" I never saw him after he died. They made me stay in the kitchen watching the crude gas light dancing on the walls and ceiling wondering why I wasn't crying.

But, whenever I'd return to the big room to plunder drawers and look out the window at you know who across the street, I rembered Gramp and the blue-stained sheets for his smell was still there.