When the Smoke Clears

(Milblog thoughts, part 3 of 3, though this has only to do with the journey, and not the conference.)

When making a sudden, last minute trip alone over a long distance, quite often there is a lot of good-quality “head time” during which one can drop into periods of contemplation, and it’s a positive thing so long as those contemplations don’t wander into raw, dark territories.

I cleaned out and loaded up the Jeep and started on an 11-hour drive from the cabin to DC. It seems I’m becoming more like my mother in that I packed my own food in a little cooler, not so I wouldn’t have to stop as much, but so I would eat more healthily: a few sandwiches with some grapes, crackers, water, peanuts and other snacks. Actually, I stop somewhat frequently when driving for fun, if there is an overlook or a nearby attraction. I get out to move about, even if for a few minutes every couple of hours or so. Advantage: no lower back pains in my travels.

Pimento cheese. I never thought I would like it but it seems to sneak back in my life in occasional cravings. My grandfather used to love pimento cheese. In the summers I would work in the family store, a Western Auto. We’d go home for lunch, leaving the store in the hands of the others, and my grandmother would take her time fixing me a bologna, cheese, mayonnaise sandwich, then, within seconds, put together two pimento cheese sandwiches for him. Diagonal slices, never rectangular cuts.

In the cooler went pimento cheese sandwiches and the memories of my grandfather, both to be pulled out and consumed on this peregrination. Born and raised in Virginia, he was a complex man with frequent successes in business, but only for a time before he moved on to the next thing. As the white lines of the road stretched out ahead of me I noted some familiar towns, familiar places of travel many years ago with my grandparents. I would settle myself into the backseat of their Malibu classic, books, pencils, a blanket (vinyl seats in the summertime) and stretch out.

I enjoyed watching the world pass by our windows but also enjoyed settling down into the floor for the occasional nap. From the recollections many years later by my grandfather, I must have been born with gypsy blood. A long car ride was a treat. Even when other children might have been bored, I was entertained, often in my own thoughts. “I think you could live just fine in motel rooms if you had to,” he commented one time at my excitement of a new room, in a new town.

My grandfather was a wanderer as well. Next to his chair in the den sat a basket filled with magazines and road atlases. The man had an amazing memory. He’d study maps and could recount most of the major and many of the minor towns through which an interstate highway passed. It was spooky at times, naming out a city in the midwest to which he has never been, and he would quickly rattle off the nearest three interstates.

We’d also travel within the town he lived, late in the afternoons every day leaving the store in the hands of my father, and he’d go play golf. I was content hanging out with him, listening to the stories and men’s gossip each day, while he’d let me drive the golf cart, gently advising me on the etiquette of golf course quiet. Sure, I wanted to be a part of all that, playing the game, but an eight year old wasn’t the ideal golf companion. In his gentle economy he presented me with my own set of golf clubs, finding a shorter bag in which he arrayed a set of clubs he had cut down to my size from one of his older sets. As I grew taller, there would be another set of clubs for me eventually, custom crafted by his hands.

On this trip to the milblogging conference I kept thinking of him as I drove. Each time I head to Virginia I cannot help but remember a time many years ago when his oldest brother died. No one else in the family could go and he wanted someone to trade off the driving. I was an adult at that point, but still with my childhood impressions of the much older man, some of those impressions based on incongruous stories by my father I could never resolve with what I knew of the man. While my grandfather had some prejudices with which he grew up, he created quite a controversy when he insisted one of his pall-bearers be one of his close friends, who happened to be black. In spite of his prejudices, he ensured I would be raised to not care about the color of the man, but rather the integrity of the individual.

On that trip so long ago I learned about my grandfather as a man, not as an icon in my life. We talked superficially at first, then more deeply as time went on. Eventually, I will say we talked as true friends. I discovered his very sharp, dry sense of humor, the fullness of the life he led including some of the trouble he had gotten into, some of the pain he suffered including being right next to his best friend when he was killed, and, most importantly, it was during that journey I came to a real appreciation for how much my grandfather loved me, how proud he was of me, and that I’ll never know completely all he did for me during the first 25 years of my life. I was his only grandchild. While he napped through sunset on the ride home, I listened to a jazz program on the radio, hearing some songs for the first time that, as he awoke, he recognized instantly from his youth and smiled.

During the last few months of his life I did not see him often, he was weakened, diseases eating through his system rapidly, treatments only designed to ease his pain. I lived many hours away. But when I saw him I saw the smile of my old traveling companion.

It’s impossible to be in that part of the country, farmhouses lightly scattered across wide fields, without feeling the sense of the nation’s history, the birth of the Republic, but each trip I take back to Virginia, whether the western or eastern side of the state brings back those childhood times and that final long trip with the man who was my guardian, the man who spoiled me, my mentor, my teacher, and eventually my friend.

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