The first memory I have of my grandfather is standing outside his former home, which was now my grandmother’s. His grayed hair and long mustaches wagged in the wind as he explained to me the nature of guns and wars. After some talking, he decided to give me a test hand grenade to take home. As you may be thinking, and as my mother panicked, no it was not a real hand grenade. A test grenade has no explosives inside of it and is merely shaped like the real thing. Soldiers use them to practice pulling the pin and throwing the grenade. Throwing a grenade is not as easy as it sounds. It is a practice of aiming carefully and timing precisely. This particular hand grenade was from WWII. My grandfather had fought in the war, like so many Americans, for the freedom of the world from Hitler’s oppressive rule.
My grandfather told me he would have liked to give me a mouser, which is a German rifle also from that war. He said that he didn’t think my mother would appreciate it though, which might be hard to imagine, and that he would give me the rifle when I was a little older, he said “perhaps when you’re sixteen”. What I didn’t think about then and looking back on that moment now, is that he was only grandfather I’d ever known. Both my grandparents on my father’s side died either before I was born or when I was still an infant. From what I know of my grandfather, I don’t think anyone would say he was the nicest man, nor the most tactful, but he was extremely honest. He always said what was on his mind, and because of that I think people always knew where they really stood with him. I can respect that.
I remember the day that I first met him. I believe it was my eleventh birthday. My mother lied to me, telling me that “this is your uncle Frank”. It was somehow better to make him into an uncle than a grandfather. His wife, my grandmother, had divorced him in a time when people didn’t really do that sort of thing. I think he was from another era, where people did what they said and didn’t say much other than that.
I only saw my grandfather a handful of times while he was alive. I find myself wishing that I had taken the chance to know the man – to know him beyond the anecdotal stories that are the only thing remaining. I may have discovered him to be more than just a man I could respect but a man that I could like.
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Sometime later I find myself looking back on what I wrote the day my grandfather died. Several years have passed, and I still don’t know him any better and I know now that I never will.