My mother would wait maybe ten minutes after school was out for the summer before packing us up and shipping us up to Nashville. Sometimes she'd drive us all the way herself and stay a couple of days before leaving us to our own devices, but more often she'd hand us off to my grandmother at the designated halfway point, Deena's Restaurant off the Lexington/Huntington exit on I-40. Cslos and I were glad to oblige because as far as we were concerned there was nothing more fun than spending time in Nashville. In addition to Opryland and the retrospectively creepy Water Boggan, Nashville was the home to both sets of grandparents, our most fun cousins and a host of aunts and uncles.
My dad's younger sisters - beautiful identical twins - worked here one summer, and you could not convince me that there was a more glamorous job outside of Hollywood. I mean, seriously, doesn't this just ooze sophistication?
My paternal grandparents were perhaps the kindest people in the world, and not just because they let us have all the normally verboten sugar cereal we wanted. Visiting them might include an impromptu fashion show with my aunts' clothes, or building a sandbox with my grandfather - idyllic grandparent stuff. My mother's parents on the other hand were a different animal in that visiting them carried with it a reasonable chance of serious injury or defamation. My grandmother, Moms, was the most loving and responsible woman you can imagine but she had somehow nonetheless managed to marry the most inappropriate man in the tri-state area. Pops. My Lord, that man.
I asked my mother recently how she would describe her dad, and she immediately replied "flashy vain insecure unfaithful obstinate argumentative quick temper quick to laugh smart charming and loving". He was a Cark Gable mustachioed dandy who would make my grandmother move to the backseat so he could pick up hitchhikers. He once visited my mother in college and somehow got so drunk by the time she met him at his hotel that he told her he had cancer (he didn't) so she wouldn't get mad at him (she did); he even showed her his "radiation burns" - sunburn from working in the yard - to prove it. Pops was also a bit of a firebug and torched not one but two automobiles. The first he claimed to have no active part in; he started his car and went back inside the house to get something, and in the meantime it somehow accidentally caught fire. My grandmother informed him that their car was in flames in the driveway, and his response was a dismissive "what do you want me to do, piss on it?" I personally consider the "accidentally" part to be alleged, since shortly thereafter he also burned our car down to the steel after throwing a lit cigarillo (a cigarillo!) in the backseat.
After JHP and I saw "The Royal Tennenbaums" I told him I hoped he'd enjoyed meeting my grandfather. Dead on.
Pops once traded his .22 rifle to a cousin for a bike to give to his girlfriend's son. I'm not sure this was the same girlfriend he wanted to invite to my christening, but it bears mentioning that 1. he and my grandmother never divorced and 2. the girlfriend's son may or may not have been his as well. We still speculate about any potential half-siblings my mother might have. Several years ago there was a horrible flood that killed over 3,000 people in Papua New Guinea, which just so happened to be where Pops had been stationed in WWII. Dad called me and said "you need to be extra nice to your mother...she lost a lot of family today." You might think a man of this caliber would have trouble finding professional success, but in this case you'd be mistaken - Pops was actually an attorney of some prominence. Which made it all the more newsworthy the time he was tossed in the poke for telling a cop to go fuck himself...that stayed on the front page of the paper for almost a week.
When I was three years old, Pops fell and suffered a head injury that resulted in irreversible damage to the part of his brain that controlled judgment and inhibitions. Which was cool since he obviously had both of those qualities in spades and could totally afford to have them take a hit. The stories of his hospital stay are legendary; my mother has especially fond memories of the time a nurse asked him what he would like for breakfast, and he responded "I WANT SOME HOT PUSSY!" He backed that shit up, too - his signature move became luring a nurse to his bedside and then jamming his bare foot up her dress. Cute! Once he came home he wasn't much better, which meant he was a pretty fantastic playmate for a three year old. We were always cautioned to keep it to ourselves if there was a certain toy or present that we wanted, because he was as likely as not to get it for us even if it wasn't remotely appropriate, a lesson my grandmother learned the hard way after Delta Air Cargo called her one day and told her she needed to come pick up her dog. "What dog? We don't have a dog." Turns out he'd ordered a show dog, a giant red Doberman, and neglected to tell her. He thought we might like it.
Pops died of cancer when I was eleven so it's only in retrospect that my sister and I can appreciate how truly off his rocker he was when we were children. Every now and then we'll realize "so he was SERIOUS when he accused us of smoking cigars in the back yard..." or we'll stumble across a photo of him reading "Oui" magazine, me perched on his lap obliviously watching tv. It definitely puts a spin on the time he rolled the car window up on my neck "just for kicks". I think about him all the time, especially on Father's Day, and wonder what kind of grandfather he would have been as we grew older. Something tells me we might be better off not knowing.
Happy belated Father's Day, Pops.
It's when we figure out that what to us was just normal is anything but that is one o the major wig-outs of growing up.
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