I don’t know if you’ve ever read your dead grandpa’s surprise poetry 23 years after you first saw it as a young idiot with their whole life before them, but let me just tell you, it hits different, as they say, in middle age.
My grandpa died in the late ‘90s, in January. When I was home from college a few months after the funeral, probably for spring break, my dad pulled out a glossy folder and told me “This is important.”
The folder was from a car show he went to where he got to see the original Batmobile. If Boomers had Trapper Keepers, this is exactly the kind of folder that would be inside. So when he said it was important, even back then I was, let’s say, skeptical. I assumed it was going to be full of newspaper clippings or pictures of meat he cut out of grocery store ads (yes, this is a real thing he does. “Look at that rump roast!”). But, I also couldn’t totally rule out the possibility that this is where he chose to keep his will.
The last thing I was expecting to see were handwritten poems and writing by my grandpa. Evidently my aunt found the stash when she was cleaning out his drawers after he died and sent copies to my dad. (I assume the task fell to her anyway. These sorts of things usually do.)
I remember being shocked that these poems existed and that some of them even seemed pretty good (which to me at the time meant “properly morose”) but didn’t think of them much again after I went back to my college town.
Whenever I visit my parents’ house, at some point I find myself taking a casual mental inventory of all the shit I’ll have to sort through someday. That’s what I was doing this past Thanksgiving while standing in my dad’s office. I was waiting for him to find a picture of space he cut out of the paper that he wanted to show me. Something pink caught my eye on one of the piles of books and papers on his shelf.
The folder was still there. I’m not sure why I thought it wouldn’t be. My dad never gets rid of anything ever, but it seemed like just the kind of thing that would get lost and become one of those family legends. Didn’t Grandpa secretly write a bunch of poems? I swear we found them once.
I’ve been going through it a bit lately. A mild existential crisis as the world collapses. Happens to the best of us. It’s hard to define, but for a while, I’ve had the sense that I’m at a fork in the road. That I’ve done what I’m supposed to do, more or less, but not what I need to do. That I’ve managed to get to a place of relative security in life, but then what? Was something lost in the complex equation of life choices and random events that got me here? Can I still get it back?
When I opened that glossy folder last November, this was the first piece inside:
You're still alive, a man.
You should quit sometime.
Life must be lived courageously.
You must do things you believe are right
You must start writing again
As it was during the war years.
You read, wrote, spoke, three languages.
Something caused you to stop
For no reason at all.
I still don’t know why I gave up.
How’s that for a kick in the old gut?
My grandpa grew up in Chicago, a child of Polish immigrants. He served in World War 2, which he rarely spoke about. He never really said much of anything. He existed for me as kind of an affable, quiet, easygoing counterpart to my grandma’s much louder and more demanding personality. When we’d visit them on holidays he’d sometimes teach my brother and me to play poker using pennies from his change jar — a little ceramic jug that said “Grandpa’s Polish Farts.”
When it was time for us to go to bed, he’d take his dog — an overweight and eventually blind terrier named Iron Mike Ditka — out to “get the paper,” which meant going to the corner tavern to see his drinking buddies before stopping at the Open Pantry for the early edition of the Sun-Times on the way home.
We don’t know much about his service, but we do know he nearly died after being stabbed in the back by a Nazi. He spent his entire career after the war working for Sears, living on the south side of Chicago with my grandma and their three kids in a house purchased thanks to the G.I. Bill.
As far as we can tell he wrote all the poems and pieces in the folder in the last few years of his life. Reading them I couldn’t help but think of Slaughterhouse-Five. Grandpa was a Billy Pilgrim for sure, but under different circumstances, he might have been a Kurt Vonnegut too. (The title of this post is the first line from one of his poems1 and I think it’s one of the best lines ever. I had to use it even if it doesn’t totally fit with the post.)
Part of my own existential freakout is about finding time to make my own art and writing, even if it sucks, because what if it doesn’t, actually? Like my grandpa, I stopped writing for myself at a relatively young age for reasons I also can’t really explain, and I don’t even have the severely traumatizing experience of being in a war as an excuse.
Finding that folder of poems again at this particular time has felt like a message that I can’t talk myself into ignoring or writing off as a coincidence. It’s an invitation to do the thing, even if I am not quite sure what the thing is yet. Even if it’s just this rambly blog or some shitty art that only I like.
I guess when you find your dead grandpa’s melancholy, heartbreaking, kinda-good-actually poetry you don’t really have any other choice.
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