Sic Semper Tyrannis

My Grandpaw

My grandpaw is in his early 80s. I think he said he’s 83. He’s a skinny bean- has been for my whole life. My grandpaw was in D-day. He was a paratrooper over St. Mere Eglise. Have you ever seen the movie The Longest Day? It’s an awesome black and white movie about D-day with John Wayne in a supporting role, as well as young versions of Richard Burton and Sean Connery and a bunch of other guys who were famous at the time.

My grandpaw has always reminded me of John Wayne. He’s got those beady kind of eyes and the same kind of croaking voice. When my grandpaw was parachuting into that little town in France, (it’s the town where the church is on fire in the movie), he got shot and shrapnel flew into his eye. He wound up getting an eye transplant. For my whole life, my grandpaw has had a woman’s eye.

I also remember the rare times that we would visit my grandparents growing up, there was one time when my oldest brother and I snuck into Grandpaw’s bedroom when no one was around and he quietly opened the dark laminated armoire doors and showed me Grandpaw’s purple heart, in a box, wrapped up in a cloth. It was something he never talked about and I wondered how my brother Mark found out about it. There has always been an air of whispering, childhood mystery surrounding my Grandpaw’s purple heart.

Grandpaw has always had a sense of humor about life. He’s never been one for etiquette or social conventions, never taken things too seriously. Yesterday, he told me a sense of humor is one of the most important things you can have as you get to be old. I spent the weekend listening to him and Grandmaw tell stories about their lives, about their parents’ deciding to give farming a try in the middle of the depression, even though they had very little experience with it. They told me about how hard life was, about how they literally built a house after working all day at their jobs and trying to keep two young kids occupied at the same time. They told me about how the three houses that they have built in their lives are still standing and occupied.

But the following is one of the funniest things I’ve heard Grandpaw say:

“You know I’m still hunting for that German-the one who shot me in the war. Every time I meet a German who’s around my age, I ask him if he’s the guy. They always say the same thing-‘Russian front. I was in the Russian front!’”

“I’m still hunting for him.”

posted by Mike @ 3:12 PM