love song for an artist

I've been thinking about family. I miss my grandfather more than anyone knows. They don't know how much I miss him because I'm unable to articulate it. He died May 20, 2005 after an incredible, simple, incredibly simple life. Such beauty and elegance as you never thought to find in a mobile home. See, when my grandparents retired, they bought a little land in the middle of nowhere Virginia, close enough to all the grandkids that we could come visit on the weekends, far enough away that folks weren't always tromping through their living room. They had a great Airstream trailer, though it wasn't an Airstream, it only looked like one. It might have been a Streamline; it looked like an Airstream to me. they parked it on the lane opposite the cosy mobile home they plonked down in their woods, and we kids spent summers running around pretending to be Indians, swatting mosquitos, and running free. What a blessing!

At any rate, they didn't intend to stay in the mobile home. Some day they'd build a house. The mobile home was just a place to hang their hats when they weren't off trailering around the US in the wintertime. They went all over the US, and especially loved Corpus Christi down in Texas. I'll have to go there some day. In a trailer.

 

This is what I wrote for his memorial service. My mum asked for a copy...

My grandfather's hands were amazing. There was nothing they couldn't create, not a thing he couldn't fix. When he retired, they became the hands i knew and loved best: the hands of a silversmith. Cracked from the pickling solutions, with the black from polishing paste ground deep in the fissures, scrubbed clean, but never white, by lava soap at least half a dozen times a day.
My grandfather's hands created beautiful jewelry, flipped pancakes, baited fish hooks, built watches, rebuilt bikes, crafted brand new limbs for little kids, bandaged our scraped knees. His hands were full of grace. When he talked, they mirrored his conversation with the same spare precision as the words he used. Grandpa would lean towards you, hands open, fingers just slightly apart, making a gentle point, more often than not with a sparkle in his eyes and the beginnings of a smile around his mouth. Contemplative, those same fingers would steeple; deep in thought, those hands would fold in on themselves, fingernails lightly touching back to back, the whole works tucked chest high, tapping a rythmn, comfortable.
Grandpa would walk by you and his hands would reach out to pat your leg, squeeze your shoulder -- a gentle 'i love you' is what those hands were whispering. You had to listen to Grandpa's hands to really hear him talk, because so much of what rarely fell from his lips passed easily through his fingertips.
I think about all the things that he accomplished: working for the CCC, developing the artificial limbs program in Walter Reed, then on as a prosthetician at DC General, and becoming Fredericksburg's official silversmith. I think about the children whose lives he made better when he gave them a new arm or leg, i think about the love he had for his wife, the five children he raised, the grandchildren he shared so much of his time with, the great grandchildren he adored, and I am so proud of him, of what he created and accomplished with those two hands.

***

love you