Finding Warren

I could swear that the memory I have of being only a year old, sitting on Mom and Dad’s dining room table picking frosting of my first birthday cake is real.  I have insisted over the years that I remember it as though it were a snapshot in my mind.  Well, as it turns out, it is an actual snapshot, because there is a photo of me, with a bulky cloth diaper bunching up my cute little jumper picking blue and white frosting off what looks like a teddy bear-shaped cake. 

And right there beside me is my grandfather, which was completely normal, as he and my grandmother lived next door to us throughout my childhood.  Before my sisters were born, there was Mom, Dad, and me, a couple pets here and there, and my maternal grandparents.  I always called them Nannie and Grampie.  I never met my paternal grandfather, as he had passed away almost two years before I was born.  Nana has lived alone since then.  She is still alive, and living at the Westford Nursing Home at the time of this writing.  She’s never alone for long these days, and happier than I’ve ever know her to be.

Grampie was a fixture in our lives while I was growing up.  He was a lineman for NB Power.  Although he officially retired in the mid-80s, I never knew him as a working man.  He drew long-term disability due to a number of medical conditions.  One of those conditions would eventually cause him a massive heart attack, resulting in quadruple by-pass surgery.  It was sometime around 1986, I think.  I would have been eleven.  I remember my mother curled up on the carpeted hallway, sobbing, despondent with worry, and me not knowing what to do or say.  I still don’t. 

He survived, and lived for another twelve years, if my memory and math are correct.  I have found that for the most part, people of his generation tend to handle surgeries like that really well.  Maybe it’s because technology and science have made it safer, and the surgeons more skilled.  I like to think that it is because that generation worked really hard, and their bodies were all the more resilient for it.  I fear that when (not if) my time comes to go under the knife, I’ll be relying heavily on science, because my body has never known the fitness nor the fortitude of someone who grew up in the hungry 30’s.

His strength of character was remarkable given the hardships of his youth.  His father was abusive, and left his mother with three young children to feed and nurture.  Being the eldest, Grampie only made it to Grade 5 before inevitably quitting.  It was common for kids to drop out of school to find work to support the family.  Ever the skeptic and joker that he was, I imagine a few one-room-schoolhouse battle axes were more than happy to see him go.  He nevertheless learned how to read, and was an avid reader to the end.  He enjoyed reading the Bible, if only to interpret it as he saw fit.  Ezekiel was his favourite book; I figured it was because of the ‘wheel in the sky’ imagery, being mechanically inclined as he was.  He once told me that he never needed to go to church.  Only at this point in my life do I really understand what he meant.

His health hindered him even from his late teens.  While his friends were enlisting for the war, he was unable to go as a result of his heart.  He served in the armed forces at home, traveling across Canada, but rarely talking about those years.  He believed in his country, and wanted desperately to serve.  Knowing him like I did, it must have been torture to not be able to go.  Had he gone, perhaps I would never have arrived.  You might be reading a blog about Miley Cyrus instead of this one right now.

He once said he met Nannie in a potato field in Havelock, or something silly like that.  In actual fact, he ended up walking her home one day by chance, and they hit it off right away.  She was many years younger than him, which was also the norm back in those days.  While they bickered like any couple who had a long marriage, I will never forget how affectionate they were to each other. 

Nannie was indeed a special lady; not just anyone could, or would have put up with his eccentricity.  Grampie was fond of Playboy’s centerfolds, and had more than a few pin-ups around his garage.  He was a notorious hoarder—not like the people you see on those reality shows, but, like many from his generation, he saw value in keeping things that might still have a use.  He would even bring his trailer to the dump and come back with the most ridiculous treasures you could imagine.  I remember one time there was a big car accident near his driveway.  One of the cars was towing a camper, and it suffered severe damage when it jackknifed into the ditch.  The owner left the camper behind, figuring it for a total loss.  Grampie ‘rescued’ it, repaired it, and then mounted it on the back of a truck he happened to just have parked in the yard.  You’d be surprised how many vehicles he had just laying around.  Equal parts ingenious and hideous, they actually drove that monstrosity to campgrounds a few times.  While I wouldn’t be caught dead actually sleeping in it, I was always proud of his ability to use what others wrote off as trash for something practical.

I could spend all night telling stories about him.  Maybe one day I will.  He was a home-body, never excited to travel for long, or very far.  In the years after he passed away, Nannie was able to travel, no longer held back by his desire to stay close to home.  Home was his playground, though.  He often pulled a comfy chair out in front of the garage, doors wide open to display the assorted clutter, tools, equipment, and other treasures the Canadian Pickers could have spent hours perusing.  He had at least two refrigerators in there specifically to keep motor oil and other such containers.  He famously converted an old fridge into a smoke house for smoking mackerel.  Not just anyone could claim to have a burning fridge in the field behind their house to be completely normal.  He also converted a club house my cousin and I had spent hours repairing into a smoke shed.  Evidently, he ate a lot of smoked fish.  I was furious with him.  He laughed.

He spent a lot of his later years napping back at the old camp.  I have written about the camp before.  He had an old radio back there, and he would just sleep away the afternoon, alone with his thoughts, surrounded by nature.  In those later years, he was the only one really keeping the camp functioning.  There was no running water or electricity, and mice were a constant chore to deal with, but while he was living, the camp was always a fun place to visit and spend time.  The camp died along with him.  The last time I visited it, it felt like his ghost was starting to flicker and fade once and for all. 

The last time I was home, about a month or so ago, I decided that it was high time I visit his grave marker.  He passed away in 1998, just a few months before my wife and I left to live in Louisiana.  I visited him briefly while he was in the hospital that last time.  He couldn’t talk, because he was hooked up to a ventilator.  I did all the talking, but I’ll be darned if I can remember what I said.  I will never forget how his eyes shined that day.  He was saying goodbye, even if I hadn’t realized it at the time.  It was the last time I saw him. 

He had asked to be cremated, and so he was.  I didn’t cry at his funeral.  Truthfully, I wasn’t sure how to feel.  I knew I would miss him dearly, but never understood how much.  His urn was buried in the United Church cemetery in Port Elgin.  I drove up the Burnside Road to the cemetery, after driving past countless times the last fifteen years.  I’ll stop in next time, when I have a bit more time, I usually said to myself.  I parked my van, and wandered about the markers, some really fancy, some really old and weather-worn, all sacred to someone, somewhere.  I found a few markers with the name ‘Murray’ inscribed, but try as I might, I couldn’t find his marker anywhere.  Frustration set in, and as the local caretaker had just arrived to mow the grass, I hurriedly returned to my vehicle and pulled out the front gate.  I couldn’t look back.

Nannie has suffered a steady decline in her own health the past few years.  She is currently trying to adjust to living in her new accommodations, where there are other folks like her, living in that purgatory between feeling able to live alone, but truly aren’t.  The house Nannie and Grampie lived in for so many years is now vacant.  The process of sorting out what to do with what remains will unfold as it does for everyone, eventually.  I suppose I’m coming to terms with the inevitability of change, that change when whole generations seem to pass on all at once.  Grampie has been gone for fifteen years.  What I have come to accept is that I have been searching for him long before I pulled into the cemetery.  With his house now empty, I have one less place I can look.

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September 24 was my grandfather’s birthday.  It is one day before my youngest sister’s, and eight days before my own.  While most of this entry was completed on the 24^th, I just wasn’t ready to post it until now.  I’m not sure what I wanted to accomplish, other than to describe how much of an impact he had on my young life.  Maybe that’s enough.  Warren Everett Murray; born 24 September, 1920; died 2 June, 1998; alive in spirit, and dearly missed.