Eulogy for my deceased Grandpa

I'm thinking of writing one. To be read on the boat where they scatter his ashes to the sea. I will not be there, but everyone seems to think somebody should write something somebody could read. And I know it would mean a lot to my mom.

He had so many adventures. The man

-played the flute
-spoke Jamaican patois
-cooked authentic soul, jerk, cuban and other foods
-cut hair on a professional level
-left his country club family to be with my Nana-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks
-claimed to have deep conversations with God

among about a billion other things.

The story he told most often was about my mother being born premature, and how small she was in his hands. His 15 year old hands.

I can understand being from somewhere like Quaker country (York, Pennsylvania) and falling in love with Key West.


His body (I can't really think of it as "him") looked horrible to me in the funeral parlor. And that impacted my mom really badly, especially along with the director there's talk of all the cleaning up and prepping they had to do because of how gruesome his ending went down. But our next stop was his sister's house, and she gave my mom a pic off the fridge of him sitting up on the side of a dock, grinning and giving the camera a thumbs up. He'd gotten a charitable (i.e., free) laser surgery on his cataracts and had went from legally blind to all but 20/20 with no glasses overnight, and everybody down there talked about what a new lease on life it was for him.

Digging things up for my mother (his fanny pack, for instance...) around the island was like touring the cast of characters from Big Fish or something. Raging drunks whooping it up and offending my mother for celebrating his life that way, high people weeping and sobbing, and then the honest quiet ones who have good and bad to say but are sad that he's gone. They're actually keeping "his" seat in the Half Shell raw bar reserved until they can make a plaque to hang over it? The man spent a lot of time in the damn bar, what can you do.

I don't even know.

Third time on the rock in like 2 months, for me. I feel like a kid again, like I'm supposed to be down there all the time now the way I used to. I was sitting on someone's white picket back patio, with their teeny tiny peat rock yard and all these shady tropical trees and shrubs overgrown everywhere hanging over all these close spaced tall white picket fences, and the sound of some totally srtanger's raging party 10 feet away and the humidity heavy in the air, thinking...just how deep that microcosm has implanted itself in me. How familiar it is, street performers and homeless people and RICH RICH people, only in flip flops, and almost everyone you see just visiting but the locals easy to spot. Blinding bright bouganvillia and loose wild roosters all over the place. As many rented mopeds, golf carts, bicycles and streetcars crowding the little roads as regular vehicles. I don't even know how to say what I mean. But I drive up and down that new 7 mile bridge running parallel to the one my Dad drove me up and down as a kid - every single weekend - and the old one is impossibly narrow, gone in places with the rusted railings falling into that marbled, vibrant ocean and trees - big real TREES - growing up through the asphalt from salt water and I just think...time. What the hell, man. Time.

I was definitely born there.

Today, so far...

I've:

-slept in

-saw that my devotional journal is on target as per usual, wondered why I don't go to it more regularly as per usual

-said goodbye to my mother, with more bafflement at her thinness and some worry that she could potentially wreck on the highway...but also relief that she looks better than she did

-recommitted to Weight Watchers, with a weigh in and entering my strawberry chocolate chip muffin recipe so I could calculate my breakfast points...

-cut up about 10 crates of strawberries; and then coated them in raw turbinado sugar, stirred and left them to soak again about 3 times now (I'm making pie filling...)

-made a huge wok of green beans and whole garlic cloves in olive oil and sea salt, for lunch

-researched gluten-free baking

-talked with all the kids about my cuban grandfather, Pa, and how we're going to go visit Grandpa Arthur (my Dad) sometime soon and see Pa, too...and talked in general about how great he was with Laura and I as kids and how lonely it can be when you're old and people don't visit and how fun he still is. We sat down and I had all five of them make him cards I'm going to send. HONEST cards that say things like, "My mom says you're a great cook. I cook too!" and "This is a picture of me, my name is Isaac". I think Ananda, Aaron and Isaac are the only three who have ever MET Pa, and none of them remember :/ It's hard because he lives by himself in a *tiny* efficiency-style apartment in Key West's Senior Citizen building and chain smokes around the clock in it, so it's just a really smoky toxic mess where I cough and my sister has an asthma attack just walking in the door. He's willing to come outside to talk to us, but how long does a visit on the landing really last? I was thinking we can take sidewalk chalk for the landing or a picnic if we have to. Make it work.

-accidentally took a nap with Elise, when I went to nurse her down to sleep (she still naps in our bed)

-took all the chickens out to the backyard and sat on the deck with the kids watching them, and smart balance and honey'ing more of our Knaus bread

-went on a bike ride with Aaron

-talked theology of Mary with Orthodox people online

-was SHOCKED as I washed my hands at one point to see that all of my finger nails are bitten down to the smallest nubs of nothing with bloody mangled cuticles around them...apparently I got through yesterday with my mother by chewing my hands off? It worked, I suppose.

-made pizza for the kids for dinner...we had some of everything needed leftover so it was easy to throw together on the fly

So now they'll be getting to bed while G and I try to decide what's for OUR (late) dinner and if we have a movie we'd like to watch. He owes me a 10 minute massage for a poopy diaper I took care of earlier when it was his turn ;)