Back to my grandfather’s toupee. It was a Newman: grayish with white hair on the sides. He saw Subas Herrero wearing one on TV and decided he should get one himself. Au naturel was not a big thing for my grandfather. He never faced people without his toupee, and when he was caught coming out of his room by my friends who’d drop in on Sundays after mass, he’d put his hand over his bald spot, as if that was his natural posture. A futile effort, as my friends’ eyes would wander to what lay beneath and tell me later, "We never knew he was bald." Well, he wasn’t completely bald. He had short salt-and-pepper hair on the sides but the top of his head was as shiny as a newly minted five-centavo coin (the flower-shaped one). Someone gave him stands to put his toupees on so they wouldn’t lose their form. He set them on top of the dresser, scaring the shit out of me when I would creep into their bedroom to swipe one of my grandmother’s perfumes.
Grandparents have this thing about talcum powder and perfumes. They have a singular scent, as if all grandparents past sixty have a secret pact to use only one kind of perfume, one kind of after-shave cologne, and then splash them about like they would stop manufacturing the brands tomorrow. So you go from house to house, the grandparents’ rooms smelling suspiciously the same. Are grandparents eating the same food all over the world, perhaps?
My grandfather was a tall, lean man. He had big hands and big feet. When I would slide my feet in his sandals (the kind Moses probably had on when he wandered in the desert for 40 years), they looked like two boats, sailing on shiny wooden floors. He had the kind of hands that would completely envelope your own when he held it. And it was all you’d ever need to make bad things go away. An aunt likes to remind me that when I was a kid, I would panic whenever it would rain, thinking we would all drown and die, and the only thing that would quiet me down was my grandfather singing to me.
I didn’t give my grandfather gifts or cards during Grandparents’ Day when I was growing up; I’d give these on Father’s Day, because as far as I was concerned, he was a father to me – he put me through school and loved me. My mother’s father. Two generations apart, bridged by an overwhelming love for the daughter he lost too early and the two girls she left behind.
Like all grandfathers, he spoiled me. I was his favorite – or maybe he just made each one of us feel that, but I know in my heart that I was. I wasn’t better or smarter than my sister or my cousins, I was just the sweetest to him, bringing him chocolates to satisfy his sweet tooth. There were no words left unspoken between us – the way some people say when a loved one dies, "How I wish I told him I loved him more often." I always told him that.
I didn’t have to do anything special to earn his love. I never felt unworthy – the way you sometimes do with people you love. I never felt incomplete.
It is unfair when the man against which all the other men are measured loves you unconditionally. Everyone else in your life pales in comparison. Other people can deliver on their promises, but you realize it still isn’t enough to compete with your grandfather – who just kept on giving and giving. I’ve always told my husband that the one thing I regret is that he didn’t get to meet my grandfather. I would have enjoyed his squirming under my grandfather’s scrutiny. But I guess my husband had it lucky: No parents-in-laws and one living grandmother-in-law who keeps forgetting his name.
As my "father," my grandfather didn’t have the luxury of escaping the consequences of his spoiling my sister and me. He tried to discipline me. Like any father, he naturally failed to some degree. One friend told me that I have all the traits of someone raised by grandparents and one left at the orphanage. That is, I was both conservative in certain things and liberal in many others; rebellious and responsible; bratty and level-headed. In short, I am a difficult person to live with.
Like all grandfathers, mine had a rocking chair. A big, hardwood chair with uneven varnish. When I’d come home on weekends early in the morning, I’d find him there, reading the newspaper in his pajamas.
My grandfather liked the idea that I wanted to be a writer. So he bought me a typewriter when he realized I was serious. He probably would have preferred that I became something else, but he encouraged me nevertheless. Even when what I wrote was grade-school crap, he showered me with praises. I realize now just how tolerant he was.
He was the typical father figure: strong, solid and silent, a little larger than life in many ways. He made problems disappear. He didn’t give out or take bullshit from anyone. He taught us that the important things in life did not come from a store shelf and with a price tag. He had no patience for the superficial yet until I was in high school, he insisted there was a Santa Claus. I stopped believing long before that, of course, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him I knew. I knew the way you just know that things aren’t going to be all right all the time, that one day he wasn’t going to be there. It comes to you at a certain age. You wake up one ordinary day, filled with a dread whose origin you can’t quite put your finger on. It takes long in coming and then it surfaces suddenly: You have grown up.
It’s been 12 years and I still miss him. I don’t really believe what everybody likes to say, that the dead are watching those they leave behind. I don’t ask anymore who exactly among their family members are they watching – is it a rotation thing?
I just close my eyes and think of my own small hand in his and I feel all right.