I will never understand my grandfather. Never. So...I'm a tad on the high-strung side. I wouldn't say I'm uptight - that makes you sound like you're the kind of person who'd like to make fun illegal - just a bit on edge. I didn't get it from him. My mom's dad was the goddamn picture of serenity. Of all the fucks in the world from 1920-2007, none were given by him. And for the life of me, I can't figure out why.
"So what if he was a calm dude?" you ask. "There are all kinds of Tibetan monks out there who don't give a flip all day, every day. It's not that hard to do. A little meditation here, a little yoga there, and you're chilling out with the best of them." Yeah...not if you had my grandpa's life.
Let's set the scene a little, shall we? His parents were two Ukrainian Jews who were born in the late 1800s. There's a big 9.5 on the ohhh-shit-o-meter already, right? His father, Henry, was an orphan; Henry's parents were said to have been killed in a buggy accident. He and his wife, Dina (who everyone apparently said was too good for her husband, heh), fled the Russian Empire in the early 1900s in order to escape the Pogroms. I'm not sure how many kids they had at this point - they had five altogether in the end - but I do know they had to leave one daughter behind because she didn't pass the medical exam they had to take before they could get on the ship. Yeah. My grandpa hadn't been born yet at that point - he was the youngest, and he came along after they'd reached America at Ellis Island and moved to Los Angeles a couple of years later (smart choice).
Here's where shit got real for him. His mother died when he was about a year old. His father remarried. It was a fairy tale wedding - the kind of fairy tale where the the new wife turns out to be the Evil Stepmother Incarnate. See, she wasn't big on kids, and since Henry was pretty much broke, they decided it would be in the kids' best interest for them to go into an orphanage. I'll repeat: they sent the kids to an orphanage. Apparently, according to what I've heard, this wasn't completely unheard of. If you were a poor Jewish man who couldn't support your family, it was acceptable to send them to an orphanage so they could be fed and taken of. I don't know about that generation, but I think that frigging sucks, and I think my grandfather would agree for the most part. He wouldn't talk about it much (which I completely understand), but what he did say leads me to believe it was like most things in life - some parts were good (he said a couple of people there helped him out a lot) and some were bad (that was around the time he stopped being a practicing Jew...although he always had a mezuzah on his door until the day he died).
Next stop: World War II. He joined the Army, fought in the Battle of the Bulge (where he was awarded a Purple Heart), and freed at least one Nazi concentration camp (one was at Peenemünde, for sure). I've seen pictures he took at Peenemünde...those are enough to haunt me for a lifetime, so suffice it to say I can't imagine what he went through. He never talked about that much, either. He did give a talk at a school about it once, but I guess he didn't want his family to have to go through that. If it were me, I wouldn't want to talk about it to anyone ever, but I'm very proud of him for having the courage to face a room full of kids in hopes that they'll learn from the past. I always wanted to ask him what it was like being Jewish and freeing a concentration camp, but hell, how would you answer that question? Anderson Cooper couldn't get you to put thoughts into words in that situation. The only thing that puts it into perspective a tiny bit is when my mom asked him if he ever thought about going back to Europe, since he'd been on a lot of other trips to Hawaii and Alaska and Mexico and such. "I've seen quite enough of Europe," was his response.
After that, things got exponentially better. He came home, married my grandma, moved to San Diego, had my mom and my uncle, and started a business. This was the origin of the grandpa I knew: the goofy, unassuming guy who used to take me and the dogs for a walk and sing "McNamara's Band" like we were the world's smallest marching band. The grandpa who used to drive my grandma crazy, literally, by making wider and wider circles in the car in the general vicinity of the place they were trying to get to until they found it. My grandma was much more of a hothead, like me, but no matter what was going on, my grandpa would never lose his cool. I don't think I saw him angry once in my entire life. Every once in a while he'd bellow at one of the dogs, Honey, who was extraordinarily hyper, but even then he wasn't really mad - he was just trying to get her to stop moving in every direction at once for two seconds. I mean, I guess it kind of makes sense; after all the crap he'd been through, there wasn't much in everyday life that really required getting worked up over. It's just amazing that he was able to overcome everything and give my mom a normal, happy, American childhood. It's definitely inspirational, although if I told the truth, I couldn't say I've really been able to put it into effect in my life so far, but I keep trying. Every time I'm about to lose my shit, I try to picture him having a good time at the pool parties he and my grandma used to give, sending out a big F U through his actions to every person or thing that tried to keep him from having a fulfilling life.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Monday, August 13, 2012
Oh god. I think a cat just adopted me. I had nothing to do with it, I swear. It was just there in my backyard, and it came up looking for pets and snuggles. It didn't even want food! You see, I know all the cat tricks - the ol' "Give me food and I'll love you forever" ploy doesn't work on me - I know you're just going to ignore me after I feed you. But this one wasn't even hungry...it just wanted to come in the house, hehe.
So here's the whole story: my next-door neighbors just moved out. They'd been "fixing up" the house (it's like Frankenhouse over there...it was fine before, but this guy, who is a pastry chef by profession, had to go and chop it up and try to put it back together again), but now they're finished (not sure how they knew they'd come to a stopping point, but okies), so they rented it out to some poor unsuspecting lady. Anyway, while they were still living there, they had a cat. A grey cat. And all of a sudden, a grey kitten and a black kitten show up from nowhere. We hadn't had any stray cats in the neighborhood for years. Hmm, where could these two have come from? Especially the one with the grey stripes that looked exactly like the neighbors' cat? We just assumed it was theirs since SOMEONE was at least sort of taking care of them because they were getting food and water, and they seemed to hang around their house.
Then one day they ask US if the kittens are OURS. Really? Do I look like I was born yesterday? It's not my fault you didn't spay your cat - now deal with the consequences instead of trying to look innocent and pawn them off on somebody else. Didn't happen. Fast forward a couple years, and guess what? Now it has kittens! A grey striped one and a black one, just like the last generation! Jeeeeesus. The kicker of the whole thing is when they moved out, they took the original cat with them, and left the rest of the whole mess to fend for themselves. Never would admit that they had anything to do with it.
I was willing to give the neighbors a bit of the benefit of the doubt because that's some hardcore denial right there, but check this out. These two third-generation kittens (3G? Well, they definitely make noise like a cell phone) must have come from two different litters. The black one is pretty young - it's really small and afraid of people, like you'd expect (and was probably born right around the time the neighbors moved out). The grey one, on the other hand, looks older and is not afraid of people whatsoever. In fact, it followed us right in the house before we could shut the door and proceeded to try to make itself right at home. Gee, could that be because it's used to being in the neighbors' house? Plus, this cat has eye problems. If someone else in the neighborhood was taking care of it and letting it in their house, they wouldn't have let its eyes get all infected. I'm guessing the eye infection started sometime after they left, and nobody's been around to notice.
So yeah, that's the cat drama. If those aren't my old neighbors' cats, I don't know where they came from or how they got people-friendly. Anyway, we're thinking about keeping the grey kitten. My at-least-23-year-old cat (no word of a lie) finally met a not untimely end last year, so we've been catless since then. As much as I miss my cat (I've had him since I was 6 or 7), I can't say I miss the cleanup, so I'm not sure how I feel about adding the litter box and the extra vacuuming back in, but...gosh, he's cute!
I've been thinking about cat names, so you what side I've been leaning toward. There's the usual boring-but-nice-sounding names like Smoke, Shadow, Storm, etc., and then there's a couple I thought of once I let my inner geek go wild. One is Castiel (Cas for short, of course) after the angel from Supernatural, and the other is Thor, which isn't quite so nerdy, and goes well with a grey cat since he's the god of thunder and all. Hey, at least I'm not going to name him Earl Grey, like I've seen on a couple of websites. Honestly, people. Of course, that's not as bad as all the ones like Mr. Shmoofles McShmoofington III and crap...I know cats don't understand English (and if they do, they're not very literate, are they?), but come on, surely the poor thing has got to feel a little humiliation every time you call him. It's like when two people are speaking a language you don't know, but you're pretty sure they're talking about how your ass crack is hanging out or something, and not about what they had for dinner last night or the movie they just saw.
So here's the whole story: my next-door neighbors just moved out. They'd been "fixing up" the house (it's like Frankenhouse over there...it was fine before, but this guy, who is a pastry chef by profession, had to go and chop it up and try to put it back together again), but now they're finished (not sure how they knew they'd come to a stopping point, but okies), so they rented it out to some poor unsuspecting lady. Anyway, while they were still living there, they had a cat. A grey cat. And all of a sudden, a grey kitten and a black kitten show up from nowhere. We hadn't had any stray cats in the neighborhood for years. Hmm, where could these two have come from? Especially the one with the grey stripes that looked exactly like the neighbors' cat? We just assumed it was theirs since SOMEONE was at least sort of taking care of them because they were getting food and water, and they seemed to hang around their house.
Then one day they ask US if the kittens are OURS. Really? Do I look like I was born yesterday? It's not my fault you didn't spay your cat - now deal with the consequences instead of trying to look innocent and pawn them off on somebody else. Didn't happen. Fast forward a couple years, and guess what? Now it has kittens! A grey striped one and a black one, just like the last generation! Jeeeeesus. The kicker of the whole thing is when they moved out, they took the original cat with them, and left the rest of the whole mess to fend for themselves. Never would admit that they had anything to do with it.
I was willing to give the neighbors a bit of the benefit of the doubt because that's some hardcore denial right there, but check this out. These two third-generation kittens (3G? Well, they definitely make noise like a cell phone) must have come from two different litters. The black one is pretty young - it's really small and afraid of people, like you'd expect (and was probably born right around the time the neighbors moved out). The grey one, on the other hand, looks older and is not afraid of people whatsoever. In fact, it followed us right in the house before we could shut the door and proceeded to try to make itself right at home. Gee, could that be because it's used to being in the neighbors' house? Plus, this cat has eye problems. If someone else in the neighborhood was taking care of it and letting it in their house, they wouldn't have let its eyes get all infected. I'm guessing the eye infection started sometime after they left, and nobody's been around to notice.
So yeah, that's the cat drama. If those aren't my old neighbors' cats, I don't know where they came from or how they got people-friendly. Anyway, we're thinking about keeping the grey kitten. My at-least-23-year-old cat (no word of a lie) finally met a not untimely end last year, so we've been catless since then. As much as I miss my cat (I've had him since I was 6 or 7), I can't say I miss the cleanup, so I'm not sure how I feel about adding the litter box and the extra vacuuming back in, but...gosh, he's cute!
I've been thinking about cat names, so you what side I've been leaning toward. There's the usual boring-but-nice-sounding names like Smoke, Shadow, Storm, etc., and then there's a couple I thought of once I let my inner geek go wild. One is Castiel (Cas for short, of course) after the angel from Supernatural, and the other is Thor, which isn't quite so nerdy, and goes well with a grey cat since he's the god of thunder and all. Hey, at least I'm not going to name him Earl Grey, like I've seen on a couple of websites. Honestly, people. Of course, that's not as bad as all the ones like Mr. Shmoofles McShmoofington III and crap...I know cats don't understand English (and if they do, they're not very literate, are they?), but come on, surely the poor thing has got to feel a little humiliation every time you call him. It's like when two people are speaking a language you don't know, but you're pretty sure they're talking about how your ass crack is hanging out or something, and not about what they had for dinner last night or the movie they just saw.
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