Making a good impression

Leaving a mark

I was thinking about how easy it would be to write about the math of hospice. How many years of his long life, how many milliliters of morphine, how many days of hospice, how many labored breaths in a minute.

But what I find myself counting is the hours until the grandchildren come home.

Molly, who lives upstairs will arrive back from work around five pm. Eleven hours from now. The first to arrive by plane arrives in Boston this afternoon; Ben’ll be here by 7 p.m.. Thirteen hours.

The others are counting the hours in growing despair. The flight from Seattle puts John in Boston at 4 pm tomorrow. The flight from Baltimore to Boston is short but Barnabas will wait for John’s flight to come in three hours later and Abraham will pick them up and drive them here. 37 hours. Sylvia will drive over from New Hampshire after work and may beat them.

I met young Bob Holleran in kindergarten. I knew he came from a smart family. I sometimes heard about his dad. I was invited to Bob’s sixth grade birthday party, where I met his neat mom and went through the extensive woods with my Daniel-Boone classmate. They were a normal, messy, wonderful family—until Ron’s wife died of a sudden illness in 1975. She was 37. The four motherless boys standing at her gravesite was an image Ron’s mother still talked about years later.

Ron went to pieces. The family was shredded in shrapnel. As the boys made their way through college, high school, or the Milton Hershey School for boys, alcohol became at first a solace, then a shackle. For twelve years he was drowning in self-loathing until the day after St. Patrick’s Day 1987.

Twelve years in chains, but 38 clean and free.

He often says he hopes he has atoned for those dark years. And in the lives of the six grandchildren, he did.

Do you know the Greek root of the word ‘character’? A charakter was an engraving tool or stamp pressed into stone or clay to leave a mark. Grandpa is a character who left an impression on all of us. He did on my children.

Ron has a genius for engineering. Their Grandpa Green is an engineer too, and passed along the Green genes (yes, fellow Boomers, that was deliberate.) It was inevitable that our kids would show such a propensity for problem solving. Five of the six are engineers of some sort, formally or informally. If they don’t make a living at it, they McGyver. (Thankfully, the sixth is an artist, like me.)

More significantly, they inherited his gift of blarney. Ron can certainly tell a story. He has a seamless delivery and doesn’t drift from the main thread. He also has this remarkable skill with the right word, right tone. I’ve seen him introduce himself to children in the checkout line. “Hi, I’m Gramps,” he would begin and more often than not, with mother hovering watchfully, there would follow a delightful exchange. He has an old-world courtesy and respect for people he encounters.

He’s a bit of a showman. He loved the attention he got when he drove his International truck. (Well, the body was International but it had the heart of a Ford and who-knows-what for tranny and brakes and all.) He installed a steam whistle so that we could tell before he came around the bend that Gramps was headed our way.

Now he is the one waiting at home. The kids are coming, Gramps. Hang in there.