Aimless Thoughts: Take Me Out to the Ballgame

A week after grandpa passed, Lily and I visited his son in Menasha. We took a short, chilly walk down part of the Loop the Lake trail, culminating in a trip back to the heart of Little Detroit. Almost exactly a year since I started writing about that place, as it happens. I’m happy to say the place is a little better than I left it. Right off the Lock, stretching the whole length of Water Street from the trail to Tayco, is a brand-new sidewalk. Fresh soil took the place of what used to be a bunch of crummy asphalt lurching over the river, presumably soon to be seeded with grass. A part of me wants to decry this as another act of gentrification. It’s difficult to be sated by a fully aesthetic revision to a working-class neighborhood. I worry, of course, that the city is trying to price the trash out of Metrasha. I also, perhaps selfishly, appreciate that we could now walk this part of the city in relative comfort, with a more picturesque shoreline and all that.

Making our way down the sidewalk a particular structure caught my eye. I’m not sure how I saw it, really. It’s a squat little thing right next to the big Menasha Utilities factory, hiding out behind a line of trees. In places you could just make out sky- and water-blue paint, a sailboat at the center and WELCOME TO MENASHA to either side of it. This was a different place, once. Maybe.

We passed by the rotating train bridge, still conjoined to the shack where, way back when, a real human had to manually turn the bridge. Dad told us a story from his teens. He always crossed that bridge on his bike to get home, and he could count on that because generally speaking it only ever rotated to let boats through. But one day - for maintenance or something - it was open a long time, and he was in a hurry. So he put his bike on his back and forded the river. At home he showered and realized he hadn’t saved himself any time.

A little further down the street a construction company’s pickup truck sat damaged, with one of its taillights shattered on the street. A big guy was moving from the truck to his own van, also damaged, recording the situation on his phone. He kept insisting the fault was entirely on the guy in the truck. The truck was parked parallel to the curb; his van looked like it had been in the process of backing out of his driveway. I’ll let you make up your own mind on that. We decided to turn around when the guy said, “Where you from? Truck says Athens, Wisconsin. Well, fuck Athens!” and spat at its wheel. Dad looked over his shoulder and said the truck driver was some scrawny, nerdy-looking guy. Hardly the spitting image of the kind of construction worker who could put this guy in his place. Hope he made it out okay.

On the bridge to the Shepherd Park trailhead dad treated us to another story. He pointed out a big, concrete-walled scar in the terrain - a channel for industrial runoff. In his youth, when the factories were still in use, water came spitting out of there so fast he and his buddy used to surf on it. They’d steal wood planks from the house next door and never managed to stand more than halfway up. He’s got some stories. So did grandpa. Wish I’d heard more of ‘em.

My parents had planned a trip to New Orleans for early March, on the condition grandpa was doing okay. The Friday before they left, he was out of his hospital bed more than he’d been in months. Doing chores around the house, talking coherently, taking care of his wife like he used to. I hear he even got on his old exercise bike once. So off they went to New Orleans. The day they left he told me grandma needed to get some bloodwork on Monday. I told him I had Monday off, I could take her.

I had to park halfway down the street. Their driveway was packed, cars ringed the cul-de-sac and spilled out into the road. The neighborhood’s fire hydrant and a couple mailboxes were blocked. Just about everyone was here. Friends, loved ones, a cousin from all the way down in the Chicago area. Hospice staff. Nurses.  I steeled myself and opened their front door. Everything after that is a blur, a weird morbid high. Somebody told me he collapsed an hour ago. He had a week left. They were putting him on morphine to numb the pain as his kidneys finally failed. They dabbled fluid on his lips every so often to keep them moist. He couldn’t swallow anymore. Every so often or so he’d try to get up, and somebody had to explain he could just relieve himself in bed. He was pissing blood through a catheter. The cancer had spread to his bladder. Grandma was sitting next to him, holding his hand and trying to talk to him. He leaned her way, crying like a kid, and whimpered, “I’m not ready”.

Saturday morning I was in the living room, dressing myself for work. I pulled on a favorite shirt and, as my fingers dug a little too hard into the first button, some feeling paralyzed me. This implacable childish self-hatred, or I guess self-pity ‘cause children usually don't hate anything. I looked in the mirror and saw a little girl in her dad's business suit. Doing the kind of gravely voice kids do when they imitate their parents. Babbling off a list of all the grown-up nouns she'd picked up from listening to her dad on the phone. Like that Homestar Runner mortgage commercial. I let the shirt fall to the floor and told my boss I was sick.

I ended up taking most of the week off. Went in the next day to explain what happened and ask for some bereavement time. Lily and I decided to take this time to catch up on some errands. It was tax season, and as it happens there’s an H&R Block in Fox Crossing, about five minutes from his house. It’s right between a Thai massage parlor and a smoke shop with a sticker on the window depicting a stick man humping the letters ATF. Stay Classy, Menasha. We were talking about getting some popcorn from the Neenah Dairy Queen on the way back, maybe hit Culver’s too.

While I was waiting for the woman to come back with my W2, my phone buzzed. Mom was calling. I knew what that meant. Got a text when I didn’t answer: “gpa just passed”. I told Lily, dressed in pajamas and a dog collar she never wears around my family. A little girl in a pastel yellow dress was skipping down his street, singing something to herself and waving a toy around. She almost kept pace with my truck for a moment. In my head she’s an angel.

He was in bed, left side of his mouth lolled open, skin the same sickly yellow as a book he might’ve lent me. Grandma and both of her kids were sitting together quietly. They had a Dairy Queen bag on the table. Dad and grandma had gone out to get ice cream. His sister left the room for a couple minutes to use the bathroom. It was the only moment in two years he’d been totally alone.

Over the next few hours family came streaming in and we all reminisced together. My brother and I talked in his walk-in closet. We picked out shirts we’d remembered him wearing on particular occasions, the handful of shirts he wore constantly and a couple we’d rarely seen him in. He pointed out a particular shirt and said, “that one’s tuff”. I thought for a moment how odd it was to hear a slang term white people only discovered about a year ago used to refer to the wardrobe of a man born in the ‘40s.

The funeral director showed up. He went over funeral plans and asked if anyone had any last words for grandpa. My brother told us he wanted to speak to him in private. We all left earshot and he knelt over the body, whispering to himself and, I hope, to grandpa. We agreed to play him out to the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”. It was the closest thing any of us could think of to a favorite song. How sad is that, I’d say to Lily later, to have never known a loved one’s favorite song. At the funeral grandma mentioned they used to sing Bobby Goldsboro’s “Little Things” to each other. I can’t bring myself to picture grandpa when I hear that song, it’s too saccharine, too precious. But for the two of them together, I think I can see it.

In any case, Take Me Out to the Ball Game was the right song for the moment. He died hours before the first game of March Madness and frequented sporting events whenever he was in good health. Local minor league team the Timber Rattlers made a lot of money off of my old man’s old man.

The house felt too empty with his bed gone. It had been right where his couch used to be. The shape of the furniture in that room had gone unchanged for something like twenty or thirty years. That particular stretch of the floor plan had always been his. I held grandma and Lily. I told Lily grandpa would’ve loved her, that I wished he could’ve met her sooner. Grandma kept repeating “he’s happier now, he’s at peace now, he doesn’t hurt now, he’s with family now, he’s with the angel brigade now.” 

I hope the angel brigade has a decent baseball league.

The funeral was held at a church he either worked for or volunteered at at some point. I came dressed in a suit that cost me eight bucks at Goodwill. A couple people who’d known me my whole life told me they’d never seen me in a suit, that I looked great. I know I clean up well, for the record. I just don’t think it suits me. I dunno. Maybe there’s still too much hippie in my blood. Probably courtesy of the man we’d all come to celebrate.

Back behind the pews were something like eight or ten picture boards, collecting basically any picture of him that ever meant anything to anyone. Most of them were random arrangements, loosely sorted by date. A couple were themed. One was all pictures they’d taken while my dad and his sister were babies. Which woulda made grandma and grandpa about eighteen. Almost nobody present had seen those, hell, a lot of us younger people couldn’t fathom that grandpa had ever been younger than us. I pointed one particular picture out to Lily and told her, “he looks just like Buddy Holly”.

On the other side of the room were two boards of fishing and hunting photos. One of them, right in the center, is the picture I helped pick out. I found it in an old photo album about a year ago and asked dad about it. He said he’d never seen it. Just about everyone else said the same thing. I was stupidly proud to have found the thing, to have unearthed some lost piece of grandpa’s story. The picture was probably taken in the ‘70s or ‘80s. Grandpa, his beard just starting to gray, posed with a gun under his arm. A deer was hanging, gutted, from the tree to his left. My dad’s side of the family collectively owns a small cottage in an area that I’m assuming used to be a lot less developed, because it was right there behind him being used as a hunting cabin.

 But mostly, grandpa hunted and fished at my uncle’s cabin some three hours north of here. We used to drive up there every winter in his red Colorado, carrying stacks of firewood in the bed and stacks of books in the back seat. Grandpa’d put on the Bob and Tom show on the drive up, he always told me they were the two funniest guys in the world. I used to read Star Wars comics and back issues of sci-fi magazines while grandpa and my uncle watched sports or argued politics upstairs. Or I’d sit up in the loft with my cousins, playing with all the old board games and toys they’d left up there in a couple wicker bins. My uncle’d make pancakes in the mornings. I’d go out in the yard and pick berries, or catch snakes in the garage.

Can I say, without descending into cliche, that some of those memories make me wish I’d never grown up? Grandpa’s dead, one of my cousins shot himself. My uncle’s fairly reasonable conservatism hit its head jumping into the deep end. There’s a picture of the whole family standing together on the beach about a year before my cousin died. None of us, of any age, knew how rare those moments would end up being. Looking at our faces, you can tell. Now there are two dead men in that photograph, one who outlived his first grandson. I’ll always feel I took both of them for granted.

We all gathered into the pews at whatever time the funeral started. I forget now. My parents, my brother and I sat right up front. Grandma spoke first, recounting sixty years of marriage in a handful of minutes. My dad went up with her, in case she needed help. She didn’t. She came off more lucid than she had since he died. I want to think he was in that room, giving her strength one last time.

The service lasted about an hour. About half his living grandsons, including my brother, performed readings. He read from Thessalonians. I told Lily a part of me regretted turning down the chance to be one of them. She asked my mom if it was too late. Mom said she could find me something to read. No, that’s fine, I said. That’d be so impersonal, and I haven’t rehearsed it. Under my breath, as I stood to leave, I muttered “so it goes”.

I was desperate through the whole funeral not to let anyone see me cry, to not let this be the first time in my adult life I cried in public. I developed a violent tremble, a jittery shiver brought on by every word of every reading. She told me the whole way to the car, it’s okay to cry, it’s healthy, nobody would’ve cared if you cried. She said I was the only one who didn’t.

I turned the radio all the way up and cried to Buddy Holly in the parking lot.

That was the last piece of this I finished, for no other reason than I guess I'm ashamed by the way I grieve. It's not an emotion I handle well. And I guess I kept imagining the longer I put it off, the more I'd have to say about it. I still wish that were true. I don't like knowing I can write nearly 10,000 words about a road trip to Nebraska but struggle to write a third of that about one of the most important men in my life. That's not quite true, of course. He's haunted my words from the start. He always will. He might not have taught me to read but he taught me what English could do, through Dr Seuss, then the funny pages, then Vonnegut. I may have developed my own script, but he’s the one who first lent me pen and ink. Every word I type owes something to him.

Not long after he passed my mom was cleaning out a closet nobody had ever used much. Mostly it was a lot of clothes she’d been meaning to donate. Somewhere amidst the clutter was a small box, a gift for the baby my parents had been trying for. A Wienermobile piggy bank wrapped in the Sunday comics for August 11, 1996. It contains one of my favorite Foxtrots, among other gems. Beneath the bank were two Wienermobile whistles. I don’t know that I can adequately express why opening this box meant so much to me, except to say grandpa gave those whistles out to everyone he met. You could find various pieces of Wienermobile iconography throughout his house. Including, right by the TV, a plush Wienermobile I gifted him on one of his final Christmases.

While asking for personal time there were two people in the office: a manager and a  cashier. I mostly like the latter and try to avoid the former. But he was the only manager around. I sighed and told him what was up in as few words as possible. He responded in a tone I'd never heard from him. “Losing a grandparent is the worst. You're so young when it happens, you spend your whole life wishing you'd spent more time with them. Kids always take older people for granted.” Then he talked for a while about how he'd been trying and failing to get his daughter to appreciate her grandparents while they were still around. The phone rang, he gave me the time off and sent me on my way. I talked to the cashier on the way out. She shrugged, “at least it was just your grandpa. Nobody too close.”

Since my truck broke down I've been driving grandpa's. It smells just like him, the overwhelming stench of Red Man. Every commute it brings some buried memory back to me. Driving to karate lessons, tossing my bag in his tiny backseat and nearly shattering a window with my bo staff. Stuck at a red in a rainstorm and laughing together at some poor kid caught in the wind. Stopping at the Asian import store by his house, the one he called “the Chinaman store”, to buy baby corn and ginger. My brother, his youngest grandson, accidentally drinking from his spit cup and hacking it up over fresh snow. My whole childhood smells like tobacco.

There's this gas station in Appleton, a Mobil with a Subway attached. It’s right between the mall area and the part of Menasha where most of my family lives, so by sheer coincidence I end up at the place with a bizarre regularity. Usually I'll grab Andy Capp's or Chex Mix. The lady behind the counter always asks “just the chips?” before she rings me up. Sometimes I’ll take a piss, too, and every time I swing by the men's room I bear witness to a small-time culture war waged by anonymous vandals. Alongside the standard graffiti, of course. Tags are commonplace in bathrooms and other remote areas. Common tags around here, all visible in this bathroom, include Sneer, AHED, BRASTIE and Kreep it Real. These are fairly inoffensive unless vandalism still offends you, and are thus allowed to linger where they were scrawled without much fuss. But when somebody carved FUCK TRUMP into a panel on the bathroom wall advertising the Fox Convenience chain, people had some thoughts about it. NO immediately below that. Another FUCK TRUMP just next door. FAG HATING TRUMP LOL off to the right. FUCK SPOON FED SHEEPLE in sharpie. DEATH TO TYRANTS, in notably smaller print, to the left of everything else and just above the first half of the N-bomb in sharpie. An arrow pointing to the Fox Convenience logo, an anthropomorphized fox with what can only be described as bedroom eyes, is labeled “freaky AF”. Way off on the other, comparatively untouched end, is a faintly visible “merry Christmas”. Vandalism, like all the lower arts, is more worthy of study than anything people pay any mind to.

As I grieve my grandfather the whole nation is joining me in looking to rotting men for direction. I'll tell you this much: grandpa stayed my course better than anyone who ever held public office. I know I didn't turn out right. There’s still no room in my heart for the religion he devoted much of his life to. I can think of a million little things I wish I’d done different. Conversations we should and shouldn't have had, all the times I fucked up like when I took my taxes home with me before he'd even started doing them. I fixate on that one because it happened almost exactly a year before he died, right before he got too sick to use a phone. It’s one of the last things in our text history. We didn’t talk or even text enough. Right before that he sent me, “the last time you were here I told you about the Australian Open Tennis Tournament corresponding with our coldest weekend of the year. How did I do. In the future you may address me as Mr. Weather.”. You can look that up, he’s right on the money. It’s because Australia’s seasons are inverted. Our coldest day here is a nice hot Summer day over there.

I wish we’d had more conversations like that. About small, weird, normal shit. I wish I’d known him longer while I was old enough not to be awkward around adults. I still doubt myself and question how he must have seen me. I'm glad he's one of the people I looked up to as a kid. I know behind all his miserly cynicism was a guy who loved mankind and believed we deserved better. I hope he's resting some place better than an urn, and I hope by the time I get there I've lived long enough to become a person he could be proud of. And I hope I die in a better world than he did.