(A while back, I posted this story. It was a conversation between my grandpa and I about growing old. It was short, and a few fellow Redditors encouraged me to expand on the story and actually turn it into a short story. So I did. I submitted it to a few literary magazine, and I actually got an acceptance letter. It will be getting published in a couple of months. And since my original comment was reposted in this thread, I thought you guys might enjoy seeing the longer version of it. I hope you enjoy.)
I asked my grandpa what it felt like to grow old. He pondered this question while we sat in his office overlooking the yard, the same yard I pulled weeds in when I was a boy. It was winter and I was visiting him for the first time in three years. It was late in the afternoon but Grandpa wore pajama bottoms, slippers, and a thick flannel shirt. His face was wrinkled and withered, his once taut muscles sagging loosely from his arms. A cup of black tea rested on the wooden desk in front of him. He’d occasionally lean forward and take a sip. Grandpa drank coffee most his life, but switched to tea when coffee became too hard on his stomach.
Grandpa’s mind brightens and dims like a beam of light underneath a magnifying glass on a cloudy day. But on good days, there’s a break in the clouds and the sun shines through again. Today was one of those days. But Grandpa is still a man who’ll deliberate on which part of the newspaper to start with each morning, so I knew my question would take him some time to answer. I said nothing. I let him gather his thoughts.
When I was a child I took our conversations for granted, and tried to escape his office so I could watch television in the adjacent living room. But now that I’m a man, I know there’s a dwindling number of conversations we can ever have with anyone, and I look forward to my talks with Grandpa whenever I’m able to visit him at his home in central California. But my visits are increasingly rare since I live twelve hundred miles away in New Mexico.
Grandpa gazed out the office window and looked at his yard, which had gone into a state of decline over the past two decades. He no longer possessed the energy to maintain its once magnificent splendor. Tree branches drooped over the fish pond he built, the pond’s surface covered with a layer of green algae. Weeds sprouted around the red brick path weaving through the garden. An empty bird feeder, which resembled a cabin in the woods, dangled from a tree limb like a man on the gallows pole.
Grandpa and I spent many hours during my summer vacations from elementary school working in the yard. We started in the afternoon when the sun was near its zenith. Grandpa would don an Oakland Fire Department baseball cap, faded blue jeans and a white t-shirt. Back then he was a tireless man with a burly body like a sailor.
My main job in the yard was weed patrol. I carried around a white plastic bucket and was tasked with eradicating any green invader that grew in the yard. But I was lazy and only removed the top of each weed, not caring if I pulled out the entire root or not. Grandpa noticed this and corrected me immediately. He stopped what he was doing and walked over to where I was standing. He wasn’t tall but he had big hands and calloused fingers, his forearms strong and leathery. And in the eyes of a ten year old boy, his presence loomed large. I knew I’d made a mistake, so I looked away from him, refusing to make eye contact. Grandpa spoke slowly but firmly. He said I needed to dig all the way down to the root and pull the entire weed out, otherwise I was wasting time. I finally resolved myself to look at him and saw the sternness in his face. His forehead was furrowed and his lips were pursed. After I nodded my head in compliance, Grandpa went back to the other side of the yard.
While I was pulling weeds, Grandpa was performing the glamorous work, excavating the rich California soil with a hand shovel for a new addition to his ever expanding yard. He planted pink rhododendrons and yellow chrysanthemums, but his african daises were my favorite, the petals blooming purple, yellow and orange like a sunrise over the plains of west Texas. He fenced off a portion of the yard and tended a small garden, too. He grew tomatoes on metal stakes and planted strawberries, lettuce and radishes in the ground. When they were ripe for picking, he’d bring them inside to Grandma’s kitchen.
Grandpa was an artist. The yard and garden were his canvases, the flowers and plants his palette of paints. He was constantly bent over on all fours honing his art, the knees of his jeans stained brown.
But after a lifetime of drinking beer, Grandpa’s stomach now protruded over his waistline and his pants sagged perilously low. And every now and then, neighborhood teenagers would walk by and howl things like, “the moon is out.” Grandpa either didn’t hear or didn’t care what they said. He’d continue on with his gardening, the top quarter of his stark white derriere exposed to any passerby.
And even with my menial job on weed patrol, and Grandpa flirting dangerously close with being brought up on indecency charges, I enjoyed working in the yard with him.
At the end of the day, in the early evening, the sky would darken. The air became crisp and cool. This was the signal for Grandpa and I to wash up, and get a drink of water at the hose on the side of the house. Grandpa would give the t-handle on the spigot a few half turns. The limp hose would stiffen, and then he’d cup his hand underneath the hose, the water pooling in his palm and at the bottom of his fingers. He’d lift his hand to his mouth and drink, quenching his thirst with each sup. This method of drinking seemed antiquated to me. And it was.
Grandpa learned this technique out of necessity while growing up on a farm in Mamre Township, Minnesota during the 1920s and 30s. There was a suction water pump outside the farmhouse, and he’d have to work the handle with one hand and place his free hand beneath the spout. He still employed this method sixty years later.