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.
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