Reminiscing

a little something different this week

Instead of what I had planned (another in a series of short, quick reviews of new music), I’m going to take a different tack. I’ve been talking around my schedule slip for a little bit, and there are several related reasons for that slip. Plus, I have some things I need to work through. Won’t you come with me on this journey?

a generated image of a generic gravestone

First, I work in an industry where things really start cooking at the end of summer. You can probably guess what that industry is based on the scant breadcrumbs I’ve dropped over the years, but I leave it as an exercise for the reader. That industry is one of the main drivers for my continued reliance on pseudonym and obfuscation. Regardless, my principal income is derived from that industry, so it takes precedence.

Second, I have chronic pain as a result of structural deformities in my spine, combined with a traumatic injury from several years ago. As such, my physical limitations occasionally come to a head. I try not to make a big deal about it, but I’m pretty much always hurting on some level. Physical therapy helped, as does a regimen of medication and supplements. If you’d like to know more about specific things I do to keep the pain at bay, reach out and I’ll discuss at length. The biggest thing I’ve done to aid in my maintenance is to exercise more and maintain a healthier weight, resulting in a substantial weight loss over the last couple of years. I’ll go ahead and warn you: there is no other way to lose weight than to stay in a calorie deficit. I do it in as healthy a manner as possible, but there’s no secret.

Third, I have been dealing with health issues besides my own. Both of my parents have a myriad of issues, and their concerns are definitely in the long-term category. More pressing, though, is the continued decline of my paternal grandfather’s health. Late last week, he passed after almost a decade of suffering from dementia. The weekend and the earlier part of this week were spent handling his arrangements.

My grandfather was a complicated man. Born right before the start of the second World War, he was a solid member of the Silent Generation. For as long as I knew him, that was an apt description of him. He and his wife (my grandmother) raised five children, two at first then three more after a substantial gap. I am the only child of the second offspring, and there is a stark difference in the way he interacted with both the two sets of children and the two sets of grandchildren.

With his first two children and their children, he was a stern, stoic, and taciturn disciplinarian - the unquestioned head of the household. Never afraid to rule by intimidation, he maintained a demeanor more akin to a distant feudal lord than a father or grandfather. As long as the fields were maintained, the serfs fed, and the household quiet, all was well. My grandfather was both a cattle farmer and a manager at an industrial company. He would work third shift on the factory floor, then come home in time to feed cows and maintain their pastures. Once his farm chores were complete, he would sleep during the day until it was time to do it again the next evening.

This pattern was his way of life for the first few years of his children’s youth: it was vital to stay as silent as possible while it was light out, so as not to disturb their father. Whenever he was awakened, he would lash out with yelling, screaming, and almost always some form of corporal punishment. He worked upwards of seventy or eighty hours a week at the factory, and used what free time he had to tend to his herd of animals. As such, the oldest children had relatively little time to form any sort of paternal relationship beyond raised voices and stinging backsides.

The younger children, though, had a different experience. When the two eldest children became old enough to assist in the chores of the farm, the youngest three benefited from the excess of time. He developed a certain warmth and kindness that was lacking from his relationship with his older children. For example, he would attend sporting events or extracurriculars for his younger three children, when he never made time for the oldest two. For the most part, the oldest would be told that there wasn’t time or money to pay for their requests, whereas the younger three wanted for little in terms of resources.

When I was five or six, my grandfather finally retired after thirty years at his factory job, leaving his days open to farm. Reorienting his internal clock after decades on third shift took months, and the grouchiness and grumpiness from lack of sleep made his mood worsen. Soon, though, things would turn around. Roughly at the same time as his retirement, his third child (ever the favorite of the family) had her own child. This grandchild would go on to be the most favored grandchild, in no small part due to the extra time available for relationship building.

After that dose of bitterness, you may be asking whether I’m upset at the way things turned out. Ultimately, he was a victim of circumstances as much as anything. He was raised by my great grandfather, who ran his own cattle farm and demonstrated an even more profound lack of warmth towards his own children. Of my grandfather’s four siblings, three turned to substance abuse in part to cope with the way they were raised. My grandfather himself chose alcohol as his vice, but turned toward sobriety in the extreme around the turn of the Seventies. This turn coincided with a serious change in his religious beliefs, electing to pursue a particularly conservative brand of southern Baptist theology.

If you’ve ever wondered how I (a relatively irreligious person) can quote chapter and verse and argue nearly any theological point you’d care to debate, that’s why. I have never been one for joining or following, so in order to strike out on my own spiritual path I had to be prepared to defend my thinking at every turn. I have many deep and abiding issues with modern religious thought, especially as espoused by the larger evangelical movement and in particular by the larger Baptist conventions. By being able to redirect any opprobrium hurled my way with actual documentation, I was able to carve out my own way.

Getting back to my grandfather, he became a different man altogether once his primary working life ended. He grew softer and gentler, although conspicuously his demeanor softened only a touch with his older two children and their offspring. For the three youngest and their growing brood, he emerged as the kindly old grandfather that was eulogized earlier this week. I was the last of the “first family”, and existed in an almost nebulous limbo in terms of his interactions. As best I can tell, I was either an afterthought or perhaps a painful reminder of the kind of father he had been with my father and his older sister. My older cousins and I were and are the “unfavorites” of the family.

My grandmother is still with us, and still treats us very differently than the rest. Even at the visitation and funeral, we were given no more than tertiary importance. My next oldest cousin (who has distanced themselves from the family as a whole) did not attend either, and for that I can’t quite blame them. My eldest aunt (that cousin’s mother) passed away almost nine years prior after a lengthy and torturous experience with cancer, and her death proved to be the unmaking of both that relationship and my grandfather’s health.

It was only after the loss of his daughter that his health truly began to decline. The past three years were consumed entirely with his dementia, and the last year he was with us were filled with agony. Back in the Seventies, my grandfather suffered an injury to his spine (much like mine), exacerbating the existing congenital structural issues that plague me and several other family members. His back never healed correctly, and as a result he suffered from near continuous pain. When his dementia progressed to the point that he couldn’t “fight” the pain off, he suffered in excruciating misery for the rest of what remained of his life.

All this is to say that I didn’t feel like writing anything about music or television this week, nor did I have the time to produce a piece that I felt could serve as filler beyond this missive. Writing this has been at least mildly cathartic, and to be blunt will serve as a precursor to the inevitable entry I’ll write when my grandmother passes. She deserves her own piece, and you can interpret that as you see fit.

My plan is to return next week with something more in keeping with what you’re used to, either another short piece or a more substantial history if I get time over the holiday break. If for some reason you liked the more autobiographical article presented for you today, let me know and I can mine my past for more material. This is cheaper than therapy, right?