There are some nights where you hit the gym and you lift weights until your muscles scream for mercy before dying a thousand deaths as each muscle fiber fails completely and absolutely. Nights where you get on the treadmill and run until you can feel your heartbeat in your temples and knees want to explode and your veins pump battery acid and you taste blood and bile in your mouth. Tonight was one of those nights.
They're good nights, because they afford you the opportunity to clear your mind of all distractions, until it's just you, the feeling of blood coursing through your veins and that inescapable feeling of being alive. What a cherished sensation it is, that feeling of existing, the feeling of having a body that works, and perhaps most amazingly, not thinking about anything in that marvelous, endorphin-induced post-gym high. My internal monologue is at times, maddeningly rapid-fire, like a machine gun, and annoyingly, seems to process ideas and concepts in parallel, which can be enormously confusing if you're not paying attention. Yes, sometimes I get confused by my own brain. Not a particularly flattering admission, but there it is.
Anyway, for once, I wasn't thinking of anything, but I was listening to Dan Mangan on the way home, and one of my favourite songs, Basket, happened to come on. I was singing along as one does, and somehow, out of the blue, with nothing in my mind as a result of the gym-induced emptiness, I thought about my grandfather. It may well have been the lyrics: I used to be so young / how did I get so old? / Won't you take my cane and hold my hand / you're holding on to all I have / just a basket full of memories / and I am losing more each day it seems.
For some reason, I just vividly pictured him, and all the time I spent with him as a young lad growing up. Since he passed away almost two years ago, I've thought about him maybe once or twice. The one occasion where I actually talked about him was on a game drive with some colleagues (I consider them friends though, as an aside) and somehow the topic got onto people who'd influenced us, and there are very few people in my life who've had as profound an influence him. I'm not sure why I felt like sharing that evening, perhaps it was the cold (for which I was woefully unprepared), or perhaps it was because there was very little game to see, or perhaps it was just the company. Either way, I shared some remembrances of him, and tonight, choked on the inexplicable suddenness of the emotions that came welling to the forefront out of nowhere, I felt compelled to share a few recollections of my grandfather.
I'll preface it by saying that I'm incredibly sentimental, often to my detriment. I compulsively collect souvenirs of people and places, little mementos that tie me to the most profound experiences in my life. My apartment is a mish-mash of trinkets and baubles, and each one has a story. It's all horribly soppy, but my most treasured memento is my grandfather's war photographs, which he left to me. My mom has them at the moment, as she's having them digitized, but they are one of my most cherished possessions. Having a piece of the past that's so real and so personal is a remarkable thing.
In my mind, I perceive time as a rope. A really thick rope that passes by overhead, just out of sight and out of mind. Mementos, trinkets, photographs and souvenirs are like pulling a single thread out of the rope of time, and anchoring that thread to the present. Any time you look at that item, hold it in your hand, think about it, it's like tracing that thread back to that rope and remembering that time. It's a reassuring mental image, at least for me.
Anyway, and as another side, thinking about my grandfather I couldn't help but notice that the people I most admire are the people who are the most flawed. Perhaps I'm just attracted to things that are broken, but I find that perfection is highly overrated in people - it's why Superman is flat, two-dimensional and boring and Batman is awesome and cool.
My grandfather was, as we all are, a flawed man, but him perhaps more than most. He was, by his own and others' admission, a very poor husband and father, and a deeply flawed man. I'll never understand the demons he went through, seeing men he considered brothers dying and fighting in the trenches, and he worked hard to hide those horrors from me, sheltering me from the harsh realities of death while indulging my insatiable appetite for war stories. I see that now - I lacked the cognitive and emotional intelligence as a youth to see sometimes how hard it was for him to talk about what he experienced in the war. It didn't matter to me then, because he was an awesome grandfather, and I think sometimes that part of it was a sense of regret that he spent so much of his earlier years drinking with his friends instead of spending time his family. His penance ultimately resulted in some of my fondest childhood memories. His eyes always lit up when I visited, and it was this memory of his face when he'd see me knocking at the door that struck me tonight while I was listening to the song.
He inspired so much in me, and nurtured so many of the character traits that shape my personality now. My love of English, of History, particularly the Second World War, which later expanded to a general appreciation for the vast tapestry that is the written and oral human experience. My love of literature, poetry and art all found their roots in the early trips he took me on to museums, art galleries and the time I spent literally at his feet as he recounted his war adventures, or extolled the virtues of Charles Dickens and his ability to construct marvelous tales, at times, quoting verbatim from his novels with an accuracy that I find uncanny to this day. We'd sit and debate for hours on the dichotomy of a particular phrase, or he'd lecture me on the etymology of some esoteric English term. As a bookish young lad, you could hardly ask for a more perfect mentor, teacher and companion.
I'm deeply rooted into my past, and the past of my parents and grandparents. I feel a strong sense of family, a strong sense of belonging to something grander than me. I can't really explain it, but it's reassuring sometimes to know, and I feel sorry for people who are so quick to throw off their familial bonds. To each his and her own, I guess.
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