Pól Rua
08-21-2009, 09:09 AM
My grandfather, Archie (which isn't short for anything, and anyway, I only ever called him Pop) was a colossus. From my earliest years, I remember going to visit him on holidays at his house near Sunshine Beach.
He was a man of mythic stature and myths flocked about him like moths about a flame, and whoever he was outside his myths, to me, he always shone like the sun.
Some of the myths he told, like his tall tales of crossing Australia (which in his retelling, took on a fantastical landscape of all the best myths... with a healthy dose of Saturday afternoon black-and-white cowboy movies thrown in for good measure) in covered wagons and braving hardships in the desert while making his living on sheep stations as a notorious bare-knuckled boxer.
Other myths grew around him seemingly without any effort on his part. Of defeating famous chess masters from around the world, and fighting pirates off the coast of Singapore.
This much I know to be true. He served in the Pacific during World War II, and it was the one thing he never mythologised, in fact, never discussed. Following the war, he served in the Coast Guard, where he grew to love the ocean and the coast. He travelled extensively, through Europe, but mostly through Asia, accumulating a large collection of strange, exotic knick knacks and odd books, and he loved to sing.
Not belting songs out, but half-singing, half-humming them under his breath. That was how you knew he was at his happiest. He was like his own personal musical sountrack. The best scenes were always accompanied by a jaunty tune.
My family's always been fairly conservative, and in my grandfather, I could often see a kindred spirit. He was the first person in my family I ever heard speak with respect and genuine affection for the Aboriginal people... and he was always respectful and considerate of the environment. In both of these things, it had nothing to do with dogma, with any sort of belief that needs to be outlined or delineated, but with a quiet, gentle consideration and a sense of his own connectedness, to the world around him and to his fellow inhabitants.
Like my Pop (who is my maternal grandfather, by the way), my father has always seemed like a heroic figure in my eyes, but my father's heroism has always been that of the whipcord thin, wry and stoic outdoorsman, while my Pop's always seemed more like the robust, boisterous and expansive heroism, kind of a mix of Popeye the Sailor and Brian Blessed playing Santa Claus.
I remember when he re-married. My mother's mother died when I was very young, and he met his second wife well over twenty years afterward. I remember him standing at my Nana's graveside and, just under his breath, saying, "that's a long time to be alone."
That was the first time I'd realized that the big old rambling house which was always full of aunts and uncles and cousins and brothers when we were on holidays was full of memories and not much else when we weren't.
And I think I loved my Pop more than I'd ever loved him before that day, and I loved his new wife just as much. I felt very fortunate to have seen him there without his heroic aura and I felt priviledged to see him there in his humanity, and to know his depth of feeling; to know his loneliness and to know it would soon be over.
Since my mother died, I don't have a lot to do with my family. In many ways, it's as though she was the keystone that held everything together. Don't get me wrong, I love them, but I don't feel like I have much in common with them anymore.
Maybe it's just that I miss her less when there aren't people around to remind me that she's gone.
Unfortunately, this means that I lost touch with Pop. It's something I always regretted, but never enough to really do much about, unfortunately.
He was a man of mythic stature and myths flocked about him like moths about a flame, and whoever he was outside his myths, to me, he always shone like the sun.
Some of the myths he told, like his tall tales of crossing Australia (which in his retelling, took on a fantastical landscape of all the best myths... with a healthy dose of Saturday afternoon black-and-white cowboy movies thrown in for good measure) in covered wagons and braving hardships in the desert while making his living on sheep stations as a notorious bare-knuckled boxer.
Other myths grew around him seemingly without any effort on his part. Of defeating famous chess masters from around the world, and fighting pirates off the coast of Singapore.
This much I know to be true. He served in the Pacific during World War II, and it was the one thing he never mythologised, in fact, never discussed. Following the war, he served in the Coast Guard, where he grew to love the ocean and the coast. He travelled extensively, through Europe, but mostly through Asia, accumulating a large collection of strange, exotic knick knacks and odd books, and he loved to sing.
Not belting songs out, but half-singing, half-humming them under his breath. That was how you knew he was at his happiest. He was like his own personal musical sountrack. The best scenes were always accompanied by a jaunty tune.
My family's always been fairly conservative, and in my grandfather, I could often see a kindred spirit. He was the first person in my family I ever heard speak with respect and genuine affection for the Aboriginal people... and he was always respectful and considerate of the environment. In both of these things, it had nothing to do with dogma, with any sort of belief that needs to be outlined or delineated, but with a quiet, gentle consideration and a sense of his own connectedness, to the world around him and to his fellow inhabitants.
Like my Pop (who is my maternal grandfather, by the way), my father has always seemed like a heroic figure in my eyes, but my father's heroism has always been that of the whipcord thin, wry and stoic outdoorsman, while my Pop's always seemed more like the robust, boisterous and expansive heroism, kind of a mix of Popeye the Sailor and Brian Blessed playing Santa Claus.
I remember when he re-married. My mother's mother died when I was very young, and he met his second wife well over twenty years afterward. I remember him standing at my Nana's graveside and, just under his breath, saying, "that's a long time to be alone."
That was the first time I'd realized that the big old rambling house which was always full of aunts and uncles and cousins and brothers when we were on holidays was full of memories and not much else when we weren't.
And I think I loved my Pop more than I'd ever loved him before that day, and I loved his new wife just as much. I felt very fortunate to have seen him there without his heroic aura and I felt priviledged to see him there in his humanity, and to know his depth of feeling; to know his loneliness and to know it would soon be over.
Since my mother died, I don't have a lot to do with my family. In many ways, it's as though she was the keystone that held everything together. Don't get me wrong, I love them, but I don't feel like I have much in common with them anymore.
Maybe it's just that I miss her less when there aren't people around to remind me that she's gone.
Unfortunately, this means that I lost touch with Pop. It's something I always regretted, but never enough to really do much about, unfortunately.