After my second cup of coffee all hell broke loose; a nice lady who used to deliver our mail and who rescues cute pit mix puppies from our local humane society came knocking on our door at about noon. She bought some poinsettias and while she was digging up little piles of sandy dirt to plant them on the side of her house, some of the shiny new poinsettia pots went missing from her driveway, and two of them mysteriously reappeared on ours. Hubby, who opened the door, was looking admiringly at the two misplaced pots of flowers, flabbergasted as to how they migrated two blocks over up the street.
Later, a roofer working on a neighbor's house told us that he saw a kid casually deposit the two pots on our driveway and skateboard off, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Turns out, it was the same teenager who on Election day vandalized our Camaro with racial slurs and other truly bizarre messages... That day, the officers came and served the kid with a do not trespass on our property notice, and left it at that.
I am not a huge believer in the juvenile justice system, but we still had to spend a few hours filling out various statements and such, and the whole time I felt oddly uneasy about the whole thing. This 14 year-old SOB will undoubtedly be worse off once the system is done with him than he is now, and he is already a pretty crappy kid, as far as kids go.
I went outside to trim my roses, feeling a slight tinge of guilt over whatever fate awaited the culprit who can't seem to learn his lessons. There were few clouds in the sky, the sun was shining mightily on the chrome of recently cleaned wheels of my car, and then the breeze came, and carried with it miniscule particles of dust from the dusty village my grandparents called home their whole lives.
It took me back to the weird, yet always cheerful house, that my grandpa built, which I visited for a week or so every summer. Every year, the outside was repainted a new shade of green or blue, but nothing else ever changed there.
There was one road that all the homes fronted, and that's how you got everywhere, from the bakery to the fields and to the final resting place. Funeral processions moved slowly, somberly up the road, with all traffic stopped to a halt, and all the little kids with their faces pressed against the windows of their homes, knowing the person in the big box was not coming back.
The women in the procession wore long black dresses, and the men - their uniforms.
I remember my grandpa putting on his military uniform for those occasions, and only those. He would dress very quietly, and I'd follow him around from room to room, and then he would open one drawer in the dresser that no one ever touched except for him, and pull out neatly colored medals and insignia, and put those on. He never wanted to talk about how he got any of them, or what they meant, and I let it be. I knew he was a pilot. I knew he got shot down and wounded and couldn't fly anymore, so he taught youngsters to fly for a while, and then, for some reason, stopped. He would never again board an airplane, and would only travel by train. He told me, when I was very little, that I could do anything I wanted to. I told him I wanted to fly. He told me that I would, one day, grow my wings from the two skinny bones in my back, and fly I will.
He was not a religious man in his life. He did what he thought was right, and always saw the best in people. He said goodbye to too many people wearing a military uniform on their final journey, so when his time came, he donned a beautiful black suit, and those who loved him said a prayer over him. No medals, or military marches playing at his funeral, like he always envisioned. Just the man himself, imperfect like the rest of us, and the best grandpa anyone could ever have.
I will always remember the forbidden drawer in the dresser; his embarrassment at being saluted to; the inability to let go of whatever wounds plagued him the rest of his life that made him choose never to fly again. I will always remember the courage he had in the day to day life after the stroke, and the generosity of spirit for believing that there are angels and dreamers out there, and no crappy kids, just unimaginative ones.
Here's looking at you, grandpa!
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