Reading · In The Garden Of His Imagination

Grandpa Perry, sitting up in a chair in his hospital room after his heart attack, smiling, wanly for my camera through sad, weary eyes. Behind him, ‘Teacher’ (left), who had forever been one of Grandma Perry’s dearest friends and kept an eye on Grandpa after Grandma died, and Edie (right), Grandpa’s bubbly, take no prisoners, in-home caretaker until the very end.

I remember the first time I saw my grandfather cry. So unsettling and strange. And a little heartbreaking. Edie, his caretaker said it was because of the heart attack, said people often begin to cry over all sort of things after a close call with death.

Grandpa didn’t really seem afraid of dying but I was in my early twenties at the time, with a one-year-old daughter and another on the way. What the hell did I know?

I do think he was awful lonely. Grandma had passed a few years prior and even though he’d probably never have admitted it or even known how to, she had always been the smile on his face and light in his eye.

Grandpa Fading: The empty chair is for my grandmother who had passed away the year before. After she was gone, I watched as my grandfather slowly began to disappear, fading into a world he no longer seemed particularly interested in. I convinced him to sit (stand), for a portrait made with one of the vintage, 4x5 cameras he’d passed along to me (to lend the portrait a greater sense of gravitas), and had explained the significance of the empty chair. It had been hers. He stepped into the framed up scene without a word, folded his arms and looked straight into the camera. He knew exactly what he was doing. The unexpected surprise came when, through some wonderful accident of chemistry and light, the bottom part of the black and white negative became ‘solarized,’ ghosting the bottom of the image just enough to show him fading away. Some days the gods step in to help us tell a better story. This was one of those early dances where the kid in me first began to understand that unseen forces will sometimes show up and help us when our intentions are true. I’m still haunted by this picture and still have my grandmother’s bowbacked chair.

I don’t remember any tears after Grandma died, though almost certainly there were tears when no one was around to witness them, but then, on the far end of a snowy, five hour drive down the Columbia River Gorge and across the high, sage deserts of Central Oregon to sit with Grandpa in the hospital after his heart attack, all of a sudden, well, he’s crying at the drop of a hat. Anything and everything could set him off. Even a tv commercial.

Thing is, Grandpa wasn’t some kind of boo-hoo crybaby. Not even close. He was the epitome of that strong, silent type; his eyes just leaked and his nose ran, and then you’d notice that just trying to breathe made his shoulders curve forward while he heaved to get enough air. It was really kinda sweet and so vulnerable. And sad.

It was also kind of a relief, if I’m honest, to finally see the soft underbelly of a man wildly reluctant to admit that he had one. I adored my grandfather with little encouragement, a complicated man of few words whom I’d never really thought might even have a soft underbelly. I had never once imagined him crying before that afternoon with ‘Teacher’ and Edie at the hospital.

I do, however, remember him laughing. It didn’t happen all that often, but when it did, he was really quite good at it.

“The hell…” he’d say with a big grin, shaking his head again and again, which sorta looked like crying I guess and went on and on until he had tears just running down his cheeks and blubbering out of his eyes. But that only happened a few times when I was around and that was before Grandma left us. Never once afterward that I recall.

The best time I do remember was during some Looney Tunes cartoon us kids were watching on my grandparents’ black and white television when Sylvester the Cat was trying to sneak down the chimney to get back in the house after being locked out by Tweety-bird, yet again. Sylvester slipped (of course he did), and landed in a tub of hot turpentine that Tweety had deliberately placed atop the smoldering fire and glowing coals. And then that perfect, ‘Uh-oh,’ pretend-innocent look from Tweety.

Something about a tub of hot turpentine and yowling Sylvester cat shooting up and out the top of the chimney was beyond hilarious to the old man who had been gathering pine pitch from Ponderosas in the nearby mountains for decades to make the family’s ancient, super secret, magical, Pine Pitch Salve, an aromatic and medicinal concoction made with bee’s wax, mutton tallow and carbolated vaseline that my country nurse grandmother swore by to draw out painful, embedded slivers, stave off infections and heal cuts.

Grandpa, who knew all about pine trees and sap, and aromatic, pine derivatives like turpentine, and for reasons still a little unclear to me, laughed and laughed, and hooted and laughed until his sides ached and he was wiping his eyes over the idea of that ever-devious and comedically, ill-tempered cat landing butt first in a tub of hot turpentine. And then for the next hour or so he just split into peels of laughter, again and again, out of the clear blue until he was wiping his eyes with a wrinkled up old handkerchief and trying to catch his breath.

When Grandpa Learned To Cry

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