Giants

On my birthday, we were driving back from the Chinese restaurant -- don't small towns just kill you? The way your little family can be the only one in the entire restaurant? The way the server hovers, asking who's related to whom? The way everything tastes a little greasier, more fried, more sinfully delicious than the corporate chains? -- when it hit me, this memory. My grandpa, sister, and me. Swimming at an outdoor pool, then eating lunch. Sandwiches and chips and Coke, I'm just sure of it.

My grief comes in waves, sometimes spaced years and years apart. The birthday is usually what does it. I always feel weird about claiming this grief as my own -- it's more reactionary, more an acknowledgement of the others in my family -- my mom, my grandma, my aunt -- who knew him so much better than I ever did.

I'd been 14 for one day when he died. We'd gone back East, or they'd come to Oregon, once every year or two. With my young age and the infrequency of our visits, it seems impossible that I could ever claim this grief as being my own, that I could ever realize the true depth of his death.

Yet, here's this memory. And another: sitting on the couch. The TV is on but neither of us is interested. We don't speak, nor do we feel any pressure to attempt to speak. We sit, comfortable, each absorbed in our thoughts, feeling but not necessarily acknowledging the presence of the other. I think I'm 7 or 8 -- who could really know? This man is a stranger, a grandfather, a wordless force that I feel within me -- even now.

That day, a bond was bridged in our silence.

I often sit, just as I did that day, in the silence of my emotions, letting my mind do all the verbalizing while my voice remains quiet. So many times, over the years, I've been called out for this. It is strange, I am told, to approach my problems so quietly. It is strange, I am told, that I allow my mind to be the biggest voice in the room.

But I think back on that day, sitting with my grandpa. I know he didn't think it was strange at all.

He never spilled his words into the air for the sake of chatter. This is a rarity, something I'm reminded of every time dialogue is forced upon me by the hairstylist, the dental assistant, the customer, the passersby -- silence is an under appreciated and lost art form, this much I know for sure. And that grief, which hits me in slow, intermittent waves, stems from knowing that the person who understood this is long gone.

All I have are flashes, glimpses and snapshots. The clumsy and carefree way my sister and I ran across the concrete, so excited at the prospect of jumping in that water and oblivious to the fact that we were happy children in bathing suits, just years away from being insecure pre-adolescents in bathing suits (everything changes when you become conscious of yourself, doesn't it?).

I feel like he's smiling broadly. Maybe patting me on the back? I can't remember him as a hugger -- I feel like he must have been a patter. And I see him carefully peeling back the bills he would use to pay the tip for lunch.

But I don't know if it's a real memory, even. I may have just created it in my mind. I remember my childhood less as a series of moments and more as a feeling. It blurs together sometimes: the stretched out days, humid West Virginia skies, trees jutting from mountains and fireflies -- fireflies! -- I just remember thinking that the world was huge.

I wasn't aware, then, that my grandparents lived in what surely must be one of the smallest villages in modern-day America: one post office, one gas station, a few restaurants ... I had no concept of this. I was never wanting for entertainment. I was content to catch fireflies in my hands and run up and down the concrete sidewalks, treating the passing of each train as some sort of phenomenon (A train! A train!). I remember that community pool on hot summer days and the neighbor girl with a drawl too thick for a Northwesterner to even attempt to imitate, who had a thick skunk-like streak of blond in her otherwise brunette hair.

I don't have a reservoir of memories to return to, a list of specific moments that made a great impact. I have only this: the smell of my grandma's chocolate chip cookies, the feel of that green vinyl chair we loved to swivel on in the basement, and the realization that I deeply loved my grandparents. It was a feeling that always lingered, long after the plane had departed and we'd made the 3,000 mile trek back home.

My grandparents were like pieces of a patchwork quilt -- the long intervals between visits created fragmented, shadowy versions of who they really were to me and what the depths of my young mind would allow me to remember.

We could be strangers for a year or two, disconnected voices at two ends of a telephone line and scrawled handwriting on a card in the mailbox. But we'd reunite and they'd become huge to me again, giants in a giant world.

So, driving back from the Chinese restaurant on my 26th birthday, I clung to this memory of my grandpa treating us to lunch by the outdoor pool, knowing the accuracy of the memory itself is secondary to the feeling it ignites within me.

In some ways, I will always feel very small. And my memories of those who've meant so much to me will always feel so incredibly big.