I’ve been scanning these old 8mm recordings I inherited from my grandfather, and it’s been a rather distressing experience. It’s the combination of extreme nostalgia and resurrected regret, and the hardest part has been all the memories of my grandfather himself. We had this complicated, shifting relationship that changed for the worse as we got older, in particular, as he degenerated in terrible, tragic ways. He was an important part of my childhood, but when he died in 1989, I couldn’t bring myself to go to his funeral. Yet now, as I see these old recordings, I miss him and wish I could see him again, and also wish I could have done something to prevent his self-destruction.
One constant reminder of our connection is our name. I was named after my grandfather. I was his first grandchild. Strangely, no one called me “Paul” when I was born — I was PZ. I didn’t learn my full name until I was 5 and was sent off to school with a nametag that stated my proper name, and told that I have to answer to “Paul” or I might miss the bus to take me home, which sounded like a terrible threat. After that, my family started calling me “Little Paul” — Grandpa was Big Paul, of course — so now I was facing diminution on top of risking not being able to come home. I have always been confused about my name, my self, and my identity, and I don’t mentally attach a name to myself at all. I’m always just the bewildered narrator trying to figure out who I am.
I did not resent my grandfather at all, though. I thought he was a pretty cool guy. He served in WWII, but he did not like to talk about that at all. He’d deflect, and talk about his aspirations before the war, instead. He grew up on a farm in northern Minnesota, but what he wanted to be was an architect or an engineer. He had kept a big dossier of designs and skillfully drafted plans for houses that he’d done as a high school student in the 1930s, and he kept them for his entire life, stored away in a drawer, and only brought out when I’d ask to see them. He did not get to be an architect or engineer.
His family was poor, and could only afford to send one child to college, and that was Lyla, his older sister, who went off to become a teacher. One day when I was very young, I overheard Lyla tearfully apologizing to my grandfather, saying he should have been the one to go to college, that he was the smart one with high promise (I think this was at a point in his life where it was becoming obvious that he was swirling down the drain.) That’s always stuck with me, that education is important if you want to better yourself, and my grandfather is an example of what happens if you’re denied it.
He instead went to work as a farmhand, got married to my grandmother, Nora Berg, and had a daughter, his only child, my mother, Darlene Westad. He enlisted in the army in 1944, where he was recruited as a “Skilled craneman, derrickman, hoistman, and shovelman” and was shipped off to the Pacific theater, where he drove a bulldozer and built airfields under perilous conditions. He never talked about the war, except a few times to mention the horrible conditions and barracks full of lizards and snakes. But then, most veterans don’t like to talk about the war, I’ve noticed.
Before he was mustered out, he’d moved his family out of the frigid farmlands of Minnesota to the beautiful Pacific Northwest, and he joined them in 1946. He had bought a nice little house in Kent, Washington and got a job with the state highways department, and built roads in Washington state. By all accounts, it was a very good job, paid well, gave him plenty of time to indulge his hobbies of camping, fishing, and woodworking, and he built a wonderful workshop in his backyard. He taught me how to use a table saw and a lathe and a router there, and we built simple little projects together.
Once I was born and old enough, that is. One of the side effects of the location where he bought his house is that there was this big rowdy family of rogues and rascals living on the other side of the railroad tracks, about two blocks away, and one of the fellows over there eventually seduced his daughter and eloped off to Idaho with her, when she was just 16. Next thing he knew, she was pregnant, and presto, I was born in 1957. I would get hints that Grandpa did not much care for this Jim Myers guy, but the conflict was mostly soothed away, probably because he got to be a doting grandfather. And he was! He was a great and caring person when I was a child.
But then the cracks started to appear. Sometime in the 1960s, he lost the good construction job. He later got a job as a custodian for the Kent school district, and I’d sometimes help him out — I learned how to use a buffer! We kids had no idea what was going on at first, but we figured it out. For me, the light bulb moment was the day my brother and I were left with Grandpa for a while, and he shooed us out to the car and took us on a terrifying drive across town, weaving, nearly hitting a telephone pole or skidding into a ditch, until we reached a small dark establishment on the other side of town, and he told us to wait in the car while he took care of business. We waited. We waited for a long time. We eventually got out and went to the door, which said “No minors allowed”, and we crept in anyway, and there was Grandpa, slumped over a table with three empty shot glasses in front of him.
Oh yeah, Grandpa was a very soggy alcoholic.
We should have figured that out from the fact that every morning, first thing after getting up, he’d pop the top on a can of cheap beer, light up a cheap cigar, and pour the beer with great sloppy gulping sounds down his throat. Then he’d pop another. And another. Most mornings he’d be in a bleary-eyed haze by 10am. His wood shop was neglected. His relationship with our grandmother became increasingly cold and bitter. His grandchildren were sad and disillusioned, only coming by the house to see our grandmother.
Once I went off to college and eventually a career, I became the worst grandson, rarely visiting, actively avoiding him. I missed the worst of his descent, fortunately: he became verbally abusive and hostile, cursing my sisters who still tried to get together with our grandmother and help her out. He was loudly racist and misogynistic and hateful, and even threatened violence, although at that point he could barely get out of his chair to act on it. I heard all of this second hand, because I wasn’t going to go anywhere near the old man.
We all expected that he was well on his way to a gradual decline and death, and I was resigned to the fact that I’d someday get a call to tell me that Grandpa had a heart attack/slipped into an alcoholic coma/choked on his own vomit, but no! Fate had a cruel twist for him and was about to send him into a new Hell.
Remember the cigar? Grandpa was a non-stop, heavy cigar smoker. It made gift-giving easy, because we’d always just get him a box or two of those cheap Ben Franklin perfectos. He’d chew on those things all day long, and we collected those empty cigar boxes, which were great as pencil boxes, or places to store my dead bug collection, or bricks for building fantasy castles. Our house was full of them!
He was diagnosed with an oral cancer, and of course he neglected to do anything about it until his jaw was rotten with it. He was hospitalized, and the only thing they could do to save his life was to completely remove his jaw. I heard that my grandmother fainted when she saw him after the surgery — he looked like some zombie ghoul from EC comics. They removed one of his ribs, sculpted it, and implanted it in his hip to grow, and would later give him a reconstructed jawbone, but that wasn’t the worst of it.
He was a chronic alcoholic who hadn’t been sober in years, and now he was going to have to dry out cold turkey! He was wrecked. He had the DTs. He suffered hellishly with the combination chemotherapy and alcohol withdrawal. I, the bad grandson, didn’t go anywhere near him at this time. Other members of the family bore the burden.
He survived, and I saw him a few times in his later years. He was still sitting in the same old easy chair, but now instead of a can of beer he’d have a can of Ensure. He wasn’t cussing anyone out, because he could barely speak with this weak, toothless, chinless bridge of reconstructed bone for a jaw. He was hollowed out and empty eyed.
He later went into the hospital for further cancer treatments, got up to try to walk to the toilet, and had a heart attack and died.
Well, that was a depressing story.
At least I still remember the good grandpa who taught me how to measure and cut wood, who gave me his old drafting tools, who had a boat and took us out fishing, who every weekend would get together with his elderly parents to play cribbage with them. And who also, most relevant right now, bought an 8mm camera in the 1950s because he wanted to record memories of his family, especially his grandkids, and who taught me how to run the projector, and how to splice and repair the film. He told me I was supposed to preserve these movies for the whole family, and now I guess I am.
