My grandfather was one of those men who was widely and charitably remembered as a “character” by people too polite to call him an asshole. Friends, family, passing acquaintances, even Bob Costas — yes, he had a long-running personal beef with the smarmy sports announcer, the particulars of which we won’t get into here today — agreed he was a “character,” but to me he was Papa, the best and only grandfather I’d ever known.
A son of squandered privilege, the sleaze who married his best friend’s girl and spent decades taking her for granted, he was disabled early in life by a remorseless disease that might attack his vision one day and his mobility the next. His premature, medically-mandated exit from the workforce meant he was homebound for most of my childhood, anxiously watching CNBC stock tickers and asking me to tabulate his Jeopardy! score in the spiral-bound notebook where he tracked his investments.
Papa’s idea of fun was to have me pick random words from the dictionary for him to define, or to select pages from The World Book Encyclopedia and quiz him on a topic. When I was older, he challenged me to go head-to-head against him in Jeopardy! and the Reader’s Digest vocabulary challenge. The first time I beat him at Jeopardy! was also the last; he wouldn’t play against me after that.
He insisted on keeping a den in his unfinished basement, a place where he could smoke his pipe away from my asthmatic grandmother, even though he could barely navigate the stairs. His disease made him too heat-sensitive to sit outside in the summer, but in cooler weather he puffed away on the porch, playing chess with the Soviet émigré next door. In the basement he listened to symphonies and show tunes and directed me to boxes of books, telling me which to retrieve, read, and report back on. Most were about the persecution of the Jews, his favorite topic. As an adult, I brought him similar novels — The Plot Against America, The Castle in the Forest — that we discussed over the phone.
Another of his pastimes was to identify “hidden” Jews. A lover of old movies, Papa spent countless hours introducing me to his favorite films on AMC (when it stood for American Movie Classics) and TCM. If Lee J. Cobb appeared in the corner of the screen, he would bellow “Leo Jacoby!” Bernard Schwartz, Issur Danielovitch, Sophia Kosow and Shirley Schrift were just some of the ethnic birth names of famous actors that Papa taught me, but sometimes he dropped the ball. Once, he mistakenly identified Charles Buchinsky, better known as Charles Bronson, as Jewish in front of one of Bronson’s nieces, who corrected him.
No adult was more influential in my early life than Papa, who generously shared his time and hobbies with me, nurturing my interests in literature, poetry, history and film. For my sixteenth birthday, he gave me a copy of Sonnets from the Portuguese inscribed “From Grandpa, with love.” But we hit a snag in my late teens when he struggled to accept my sexuality. I’d realized I was gay at 14, with a little help from Gina Gershon, and came out to my then-Republican parents at 17. When my liberal grandparents found out, Grandma responded by sending me a flowery greeting card she signed in her name and my grandfather’s. “We love you and are proud of you,” she scribbled, but behind the scenes, Papa called my mom repeatedly to argue I wasn’t gay. For one thing, I had long hair.
A decade later, he was uncharacteristically remote the first time he saw me with my former partner, staring at us from across the room without saying anything. He couldn’t quite seem to believe it was true: I was gay after all. He looked at me searchingly, maybe wondering if he’d ever really known me (or, more likely, if I really knew myself); I’m unsure what, if anything, he found. Despite his strange behavior, it was one of the most moving moments of my adulthood for the two people in the world I shared the deepest emotional bonds with to be in the same room together. There’d been a pervasive belief in my family that I would never open myself up to a serious relationship. Papa had lived long enough to see it happen, even if he didn’t understand it.
His personal dream for me, shared innumerable times over the years, was that I would become a writer and tell a sanitized version of his life story — and that I would marry a doctor. He had even selected a dream medical school for my imaginary husband. Oddly, a few years after Papa died, I indeed married a graduate of that school. Crankenstein, of course, is not what he had in mind. Her gender, religion and cultural background would have disappointed him, though he would’ve taken pride in her accomplishments. Sometimes I try to imagine them in conversation, knowing they would’ve gotten a kick out of each other. At the end of their discussions about WWII, I suspect he would’ve found a way to broach a tricky subject: “Are you absolutely certain you’re homosexual? I ask because of your hair…”
The title of this post comes from the Rosanne Cash song that got me through my grandfather’s death. Cash’s articulation of grief — “I’m the sparrow on the roof/I’m the list of everyone I have to lose/I’m the rainbow in the dirt/I am who I was and how much I can hurt” — continues to deeply resonate with me. I may not look for Papa in morphine, but he makes regular appearances in my dreams, where he’s sometimes free from the shackles of illness that constrained him in life.