It blows my mind how dormant ghosts lie. It blows my mind even more that people can become ghosts before they die. This realization came upon me like the bite of cold wind when you forget to pull your scarf tight. But the comforts of understanding this realization pulled the scarf snug and bolstered me firmly to the in-between, to meet the ghosts, to push them out from their haunted rooms of my conscience.
Whidbey Island is the succinct definition of the Pacific Northwest. On it grow the towering evergreens, the low ferns, the roots of many secrets, which define this region. My two brothers spent much of their adolescence here with their alcoholic father learning how to fuck up and sometimes how to make up. Throughout my life I’ve been to Whidbey many times to visit extended family and grandparents; occasionally just to drive the winding roads and bathe in the beauty of the foamy coasts. My fondest memories of my grandfather are of silence. He’s a man of pride, of integrity, of secrets. He’s right about everything, always. In his basement lies a living room size replica of a train town. Little Hot Wheels toy cars have been repainted to look 1950’s, tiny plastic men direct immobile citizens around town, a conductor waves from the side of the tracks, papier-mâché mountains hold up sparse green trees. When I was a child the only thing I looked forward to about visits to the grandparents’ was watching this replica town come to life. I would wait, almost in silence, sometimes letting a few words slip out, “Do you still have the trains, grandpa?” with absolute fear. My hands would tremble and become sweaty as I worked up the courage, but he’s always had bad hearing and never heard me the first time. This meant I had to work up the courage to say it a second time after hearing him growl at me that I needed to speak up. Finally, at some point throughout the day, he would get up from his recliner, walk towards the hall and turn on the light. “Would you like to see the trains?” he’d ask. My heart would leap inside my chest. I would like nothing more than to escape the tick-tock of the suffocating living room. My grandmother collects clocks and they all function, always, so even when no one’s talking, hundreds of clocks are ticking away. Every hour a cookoo bird jumps out frantically, grandfather clocks chime, bells ring, and the anxiety of a family who has never been able to communicate heightens. I stand up from the couch and follow him downstairs. We walk slowly down the carpeted staircase and I see pictures of my grandmother’s family, she’s actually a step-grandmother so I don’t know any of them. It feels very foreign walking through a hall that should contain pictures of your own family but instead are covered in pictures of someone else’s. We’d reach the bottom and there it would stand, gloriously, at eye level, a fake mechanical town. Grandpa pushed a couple of buttons, some lights turned on, a hum began, he pushed forward a lever, and from a tunnel a train car came chugging out and began its journey around the town. Grandpa was silent. The train buzzed. The control panel was large and complicated. I always wanted to ask to control it, always; but I never had the guts. I watched his hairy, wrinkly hands move those levers and his eyes guide his creation along the tracks. If I could choose one thing to remember about my grandpa, this would probably be it: us standing near each other in silence watching a fake town come to fake life. But it isn’t. There’s a lot more that I remember about him.
Eating lunch or dinner with them terrified me. What it meant was that scrawny little me would have to eat an entire meal, finish everything, or face the torment of my grandfather’s indignation. When I first got braces things became quite difficult to eat. We had finished a pleasant lunch, probably a warm brothy soup, and grandma had brought out sliced pears. With my fork I cut up little bites and the stringy bits of the fruit began to tangle with the wires of my braces. It was uncomfortable, and I was full, terribly full. “Mom, the strings are getting stuck in my teeth. I don’t think I can eat anymore,” I pleaded to my mother. But instead of a response from her, no she cowered in fear from grandpa still, she had never stopped, I was given the blunt response of my grandfather as rough as if he’d given me a Charlie horse. “You’ll finish what’s on your plate, boy.” It was almost never the words that he said. More often it was the utter dislike in his voice, it felt like hatred the way he talked to his own blood and that confused me. My grandparents own a traditional farm, a large green back forty, and endless cow pies. From the dining room table I looked out over the broad shoulders of my grandfather covered in a woven button up. He always wore strong cowboy boots, brown, a large belt, and a black cowboy hat. I looked out over their back forty and began to cry. I glanced at the clock to see how long I must endure this and turned back to my plate of pears, forcing each bite down with a gag. As much as I’d love to remember the trains, the most prominent memories of my grandfather are of times like these. Times of hatred, times of awkwardness, times of restraint, the most anti-familial times I’ve ever known.
I went back to Whidbey recently to visit them. You might’ve called it a bit of a family reunion. My aunt and uncle who live in Missouri came up along with one of their daughters to Whidbey to visit my grandparents and invited my mother, her husband, and I to come along, too. At first, I was certain I had no intention of going. But since death has been a much more relevant theme in my life as of late, I decided to go. Who knows how many days, weeks, months, or years my grandparents have left. The stress of the upcoming visit threw me into internal panic. I was freaking the fuck out for a day in advance. I spent so much energy contemplating whether to dress in a manner positively impressionable to them, or completely Seattleite in nature; if there’s anything my grandfather can’t stand, it’s city boys. I evaluated every possible outcome to this visit and began to terrify myself. But I was excited too. The last time I saw my grandfather I was not old enough to retaliate. It’s been many years since I’ve seen him. The playing field is level now. Physically, we’re equal. His years have granted him experience, but for all intents and purposes we are equal. In fact, I have the body now that he probably reminisces about daily. In a fight, I’d probably win. But the very fact that I’m considering whether I would beat my grandfather in a fistfight is indicative of the way our relationship functions. I’ve lowered us to physical rivals because in a verbal tangle I know neither of us would ever consider the other a victor. I arrived prepared, but not completely. Never completely.
We shook hands and smiled cordially. He examined me, contemplated in his head whether he considered me a man or not; he does not consider his fifty something year-old son a man, so I doubt I passed his qualifications of manhood. The tension set in. My aunt and uncle were in the dining room standing around. We all hugged and shook hands awkwardly, as if we were used to it, but more like it was obligatory. Our eyes feared meeting one another. We stood in pained silence for a while before moving to the tick tock of the living room. We sat in an old leather couch, two wooden rocking chairs, and cushy recliners. The silence hollowed out our ears and devoured our brains. Every once in a while my uncle made a wise crack that alluded to our dysfunction. It made things worse. Mostly, I was glad my grandfather had not yet been an asshole. Perhaps the years had mellowed him. I finally decided to break the silence by playing the piano. I played two of my own songs before I heard someone grumbling. “What?” I said to the room behind me. “Play that outside, won’t you?!” I heard my grandfather yell. I smashed a chord loudly against the keys. “What?” I asked again. “Play that outside!” I slammed the keys down. “What?!” “Can’t you play that any quieter!? We can’t hear ourselves talking in here.” I slammed the keys once again. They were talking about felling trees and cutting it into firewood. Mostly they discussed topics that would bore the average person to a suicidal state. They have no idea how to discuss topics that are relevant to the modern world, let alone related to the secret dysfunction of our family tree. “He doesn’t mean it, Daniel.” I heard my aunt say from the kitchen. I played a few notes, quietly, played a few more, and ended with a soft and full chord. I began to close the piano. “We’re tired of hearing your music anyways,” I called to him sarcastically. He didn’t reply. Which, obviously, said more than if he had.
Later in the evening my uncle asked my grandfather if he still had his trains. My ears perked up, but I feigned disinterest. I immediately wondered if he did, if he would let me man the controls now. Not that I’d ever ask, or that I would even enjoy the actual act of doing it. The boyhood wonder of electrical trains has eluded me. But out of principle this would be a rewarding experience. My grandfather’s reply was depressed and tragic. “I haven’t run them in so long. The tracks are too dusty for them to even run now. I’d have to wipe down the whole thing. It’s just too much work.” The one positive thing I can recall in regards to my grandfather had died. The tracks were covered in dead skin and dirt. The fake town had fake died. Maybe this is when my undead grandfather’s, not in the zombie sense but the literally “alive” sense, ghost came out of hibernation. He sat there before me rocking slowly in a rocking chair and his ghost flew around my mind creepily echoing its cries through the caverns of my skull. If he didn’t have the trains, what place did he have in my life? Dinner passed uneventfully. He ate little and my mother remarked on the fact that she now got to watch her father finish his meal. Things had come full circle, she said. Of course she whispered this to me far from his ears. But it was eerily true. There we all were, watching grandpa finish his meal from the end of the table. I watched his eyes throughout the entire day we visited. A couple of times they glistened around the edges. I am pleased with the thought that the glitter in his eyes was in fact the glitter of tears and not merely the peculiar secretions of old age. I suppose that’s what tears are though. From the end of his table, chuckling about something unfunny, I could see his eyes glittering behind his large glasses.
After dinner he asked me to play a song on the guitar. “Can you play it quieter than the piano?” he asked. “Probably not, but I can play it at least as loud.” “Pretend you’re in a dorm room,” he said to me. “I don’t live in the dorms and if I did I’d probably play to loud.” “With an attitude like that I can see why you don’t.” I pulled my guitar slowly from its case as he grumbled, “Play something old people know.” I sat in quiet contemplation for a moment then began to play Last Kiss by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers. He listened in complete silence. He let me play the entire song without a single interruption. When I finished he said, “That wasn’t too bad.” If I was his age my heart would have gave in. I would’ve died on the spot, heart stopped, not quite happy, nor content, but maybe a little satisfied. We didn’t say another word to each other for the rest of the evening until I left. I barely spoke to anyone there but my younger cousin with whom I could relate on the topic of my grandfather’s cold heartedness, but even that was hardly in-depth. My family doesn’t know each other. They know the basic facts: who’s married, whose kids are whose, and even some of these things get blurry when you have to consider divorce, remarriage, and death. I thought that I was handling the whole visit fairly well. Aside from a considerably neutral comment, practically positive coming from my grandfather’s throat, things had been either shitty or uneventful, which is basically what I’d anticipated; shit and stagnation.
After a horrible forced bout of pictures and posing, I grabbed my coat and prepared to leave. I walked to my grandfather to shake his hand and he came up to give me a one handed man-hug. Something raised in me, through my throat and onto my tongue, a strong dose of courage that had never before existed in the presence of my grandfather. I said, making sure it was loud enough that I wouldn’t have to repeat it, “You know, we might not get along so well, but you’re still my grandfather.” He looked at the floor in stunned silence. I examined his purple cheeks and bulbous nose. He was shorter than me. His bald head reflected the light of the dim room and I could see small gray hairs protruding wildly from the sides of his head. His head came up slowly and he looked up at me, perhaps with hesitation, or a stutter, finally saying, “Well said.” I turned to leave and grabbed my hat. “Hey, put that on, let’s see it,” he said. It was a nice fedora that I’d bought recently. “You’re mother says it looks funny on you, let’s see it. I turned around and plopped it on my head, at an angle, partly covering one ear. “Hey that doesn’t look funny, it looks pretty good,” he said. From the counter he grabbed a camera and snapped a picture. It was the only picture he took that evening, or that day, perhaps in his entire life the only picture he ever took. It was surprisingly rewarding.
I gave a round of hugs and my grandmother bode me farewell warmly. “You don’t have to wait ‘till your folks come around just to visit,” she said. She was right, but she was wrong. I would never find myself in the same room with them alone, I wouldn’t know what to do or say, but it felt good to hear her say that. It was kind of like someone saying I love you.
Today as I was prancing about a graveyard of train cars, I thought of my grandfather’s ghost. His isn’t the only one that haunts me. The tracks lie close to a beach behind a large No Trespassing sign. There’s something terribly liberating about being places you’re not supposed to be. I climbed up on top of the tankers and looked out over the ocean and the setting sun. For some reason the presence of everything made me think of these ghosts. The unmoving train cars and empty beer bottles nearby, the graffiti on the train cars, the cold ocean breeze, it all made me think of ghosts. But I felt warm inside. Maybe I felt warm because the ghosts were dormant again. I’m hoping I’ve at least begun the process of exorcising them because being haunted by the ghosts of living relatives is a terrible phenomenon. It’s bad enough for the spirits of the dead to make themselves prominent, but when you’re being chased around the long and dark halls of your mind by ghosts you’ve fabricated, you’re really only running from the ghost of yourself, and I’m not even dead yet. Perhaps it’s a paradox, perhaps it’s an oxymoron. All that I really know is that it’s exhausting and if nothing else, if I can’t learn to love them, I must learn at least to befriend these ghosts.
