The Grandparent Road

Looks like I'll be on the highway again this weekend. My paternal grandmother is in the hospital after heart surgery and I want to go see her; I'm told the operation went well and although they did a quadruple bypass instead of a triple she's supposedly sitting up in the chair in the recovery room today. Kind of good to know I'm working with robust genes. She's quite fond of exclaiming "Ah-woooooh!" with a pitch upturn as you approach the end of the pronunciation, and I'm sure I'll get one when I see her tomorrow. My dad has reassured me that I don't need to go out of my way to visit, but I want to. I regret not seeing my maternal grandfather as often as I could have and should have when he was recovering from a similar surgery; although all was apparently well he never fully recovered and died six weeks after the operation. It's not convenient for me to go see her; there's a lot of driving time and gasoline burned, but none of that matters. Friends and family and friends who are family are, in that order, the most important reasons we ring around the sun on this rock we call home.

As we're all familiar (and as the old cliché goes), life is a road full of interesting turns. We explore relationships and find those people with whom we do and do not want to spend time traveling with. My grandparents traveled very different roads - my mom's parents were very well off while my dad's parents (and my dad) grew up with nothing. My dad slept on a cot in an unheated room until he was ten, often complaining of scraping ice off the inside of the window in the wintertime; my mom's parents owned several large houses, had servants, came from money, and were high society in Guilford County. The love between my grandparents was very different on Dad's side and Mom's side. My dad's father worked shift work in the paper mill his entire life after serving in the army; my mom's father was a successful lawyer until the day he died. Both worked very hard and valued family, but they showed love differently. My dad's parents had a reserved love - one restrained and not flamboyant; as a child I didn't even think they loved each other at all (this naiveté wore off as I matured). Borne of convenience, it grew into what it was when my paternal grandfather passed - a warm, country romance with no frills where each had deep stoic need of the other. My mom's father courted my grandmother in far more ostentatious manner- lavish parties and weekend getaways to the coast and tea at the country club... she was a southern belle and he loved her for who she was and her stature in society. As they grew older they traveled the world, they attended soirées, they raised a large and well-mannered family under the shade of the money tree. I have never seen a more textbook "proper" romance of the well-to-do, even in literature. But they too loved each other; visibly happier when in proximity to one another and I have never been more crushed in my life when I looked at her face the day I carried his casket to their grave.

Between the two, I don't feel one of their loves is better than the other; beyond what is ostensible they're not really even different. More like different manifestations of the same idea. I think when you find the person you are meant to love, you'll share your definition of it.

Since I'm borderline overusing clichés in this, here's something you might not know about the origin of the word "cliché." In earlier days synonymous with "stereotype," these words come from the world of the printing press and typecasting (which is another word with similar meaning in today's vernacular). Stock sentences used often in literature were "stereotyped" or cast into blocks for easy reuse in press plate making. Cliché is quite literally the onomatopoeia of splashing the typecast into metal and casting the stock sentence. It's basically your origin of a canned response - a hackneyed phrase tailored for ease of use and repeatability.

Sometimes when I look to the future, I wonder "how does one look for someone to become a grandparent with?" I don't know nor do I pretend to understand what celestial forces create the ebb and flow of human emotion on the heart; I try to draw from relationships I have seen in my life and find my own path. It's hard at times. It can seem to take you where you don't want to go. But I don't believe that love is a stock phrase. It's not a mold you should try to press upon yourself. It's not hackneyed. It should be unique when you find it - or maybe, more appropriately, when you define it - and what it creates should inspire others to find it for themselves.

I'll part with a thought of a favorite unknown writer of mine. Enjoy your weekend, and best of luck on your travels.

We orbit. Erratically. Sometimes we are so close to each other; sometimes we are so far apart. Cyclical. Unpredictable. When we are pushed apart from one another I feel your pull tearing at me even though I want to keep moving away. I know I'll be drawn back to you and you to me even if we don't want that to happen. I fight it because you fight it, because I don't know if anything good or bad could ever come of it, because I want to believe I could find someone else that attracts me as much as you do. That my future isn't written. As we drift now, so entangled, so intertwined in this grave ballet, we have to be on a collision course. It's my best chaotic logic. We are destined to collide. After that we'll see if we skip off one another and cease to exist as a pair, or - maybe - if that collision is so cosmic we will no longer be able to separate. I don't want for a quick resolution; such celestial events take time.

- Terrace Wind