I was fresh out of Quartermaster school and everything, and I’d write him letters in morse. Dit-da-dit kind of stuff. He corrected me. In morse. It had to be close to fifty years for him since his last time talking to ships via morse off the Island of Sao Miguel in the Portuguese Azores, and the old son of a bitch would correct me.
This would go on for a little while. Until one day, off some Latin American coast, chasing go-fasts, I’d get woken from my rack and escorted to our situation room, where the untraceable went on. It was the Red Cross this time. As soon as they heard my voice, they patched the call over to my uncle in CT. “Grandpa’s gone,” he said.
He was 80 something.
And a big shot back in the day in Portugal. Marconi was the shit back then, a very reputable company. And telegraphing morse before, during and after world war time was what a big shot did. House servants, the whole nine.
Portugal was supposedly neutral, a non-combatant in World War II. Come on, man, really? With more time I could have learned more of this juicy. Who did you comms with back then, Grandpa? Did you ever see what was on those ships up close? Come on, tell me. I picture him smoking a shitload of cigarettes while he was doing it, too. You get interested in cool stuff like this when it’s too late sometimes.
What I do know is that he a was a big-enough big shot that he sat at the captain’s table, with the captain, on the way to the Statue of Liberty to meet his wife, my grandmother. I picture him there in an ornate dining room in a suit. Sipping aguardiente. Smoking cigarettes. Spinning tales on his way to CT, me, diabetes.
It’s the last time he spoke proud Portuguese. From the time he set foot in Danbury, CT. where a lot of Portuguese lived, he and my grandmother tried to forget it. So much so, my mother would wind up a French teacher and never once speak to me in her native tongue.
Have you heard Portuguese?
Eaten Portuguese?
Man, fuck the French.
My aunt puked the whole way across the Atlantic. My mom probably wore passengers and crew out with her questions. At some point, they’d find themselves at a Plymouth Chrysler dealership in a nearby town, where my mom met my dad. His name was on the building, which of course begs the question: was my mom a gold digger? Who knows. And what’s wrong with wanting to marry a stable man, anyway? I’d tell my daughter the same thing if I had one.
They’d marry in the mid-60’s. I assume they tried for a little while to have a kid. I’m not sure when it got around news-wise that my dad was smacked in the junk with a baseball bat while he was a kid. He finally got it checked out thanks to my mom. He’d wind up with one nut and a boy who wasn’t his own. I don’t think he ever warmed up to the boy, either.
I wonder just how much influence if any my grandfather had on the whole decision. He was adopted, too. He would tell these tales over hot caldo verde soup of his real parents living on a hill and performing random acts of anonymous love. And kids being the little douchebags they are sometimes, they’d tell him: “Those aren’t your parents. Your parents are up there.”
I can’t help but think my grandfather at least chimed in his two cents when he discovered that his son-in-law, my father, was one nut short of a full sac. I like to go with that line even if it’s not true. My grandfather and I shared a love of the sea. I was his favorite grandson I think because of it. The adoption part didn’t hurt. I had a really strong relationship I’d say up until the very end, when I had to come to my grandmother’s defense. He was too much, too intractable. And she couldn’t take it anymore. I’d have said it in Portuguese if I could: cut the shit, man! He never got over that, I don’t think.
But he was a normal dude. Weak. No threshold for pain like my grandmother’s. Despite all of that, he warmed up the entire room with his presence. Kissed me on the lips everyday before I’d walk out to the end of the driveway and wait for the bus. I’d yell out to him, “It’s here!’ and he’d yell back from the window in his thick accent, “Okay, have a good day.”
I see his charm now more than ever, though I’d take it in at the grocery store whenever the cashier was young and cute, too. It was pretty obvious. My grandfather couldn’t help himself. Dirty bastard couldn’t take his eyes off my wife’s ass, either.
And the relationship he had with his son-in-law, my father, was quite unlike any. They smoked and drank together, years before I ever entered the scene and afterwards. I felt the connection. I’m a little jealous of it today. Not in a bad way. Just a way. I’d love to have that with a father-in-law. That kind of way. Still, I couldn’t have asked for better. My grandfather signed my parents’ name on every one of my pink detention slips that I ever got from school.
And taught me how to be a gentleman.
Things Men Carry 