Old Writing: My Grandfather

            My grandfather was a quiet man.  My grandmother did most of the talking, which was fine with him.  He listened and watched from his old leather chair.  Mostly, I remember him in that chair.  It’s where he went when they wouldn’t let him work anymore.  They gave him a gold ring with a ruby and told him he had worked enough, whether he liked it or not.

            He would wake up in the morning, eat breakfast, then sit in his chair until lunch, unless there was something my grandmother needed him to do.  There usually wasn’t.  So he would watch TV, getting up only when he had to.  Most days, that was all.  Sometimes, though, when I was very young, and I don’t know why, he would wake up different.

            Those mornings were my favorites.  He would wake me up early and we would have breakfast, same as always, but instead of going to his chair to watch reruns of old Westerns afterwards, we would go out into the garage, pick out walking sticks, fill our canteens, and leave.  Sometimes we would bring food, but not usually.

            We would walk and I would talk, out past the cane fields, on the old railroad tracks that didn’t carry trains anymore, a cadence of steps and the thumping of the walking sticks, rhythmic and slow.  After awhile, we had left the little town where we lived behind and I would become the quiet one as he told me stories about when he was young, about his family.  I wish I could remember those stories, but I never cared as much about the details as I did about the feeling of his telling them.

            We would go into the woods and he would tell me the names of flowers and what things were good to eat.  He always saw the rabbits and birds before I did.  I was too busy trying to take everything in at once, as children are prone to do.  We would walk alongside the old tracks, overgrown and reclaimed by the wild, and for the only times in my whole life, my grandfather was no longer quiet.

            When we eventually got back to town, I’m not sure how but I never needed to know the way, we would make our way back home, side by side, footsteps and thumps, hang up our canteens, put away our walking sticks, and he would go back to his chair, I to my room.  When I got older, we never talked about those walks, but I remember the feeling and, as I watched him dying slowly over the two years after my grandmother left us, I would see, as he looked into the backyard from his wheelchair, the man who took me walking.