Requiem, final.
I don't have many memories of my Grandfather. Those I still possess are good ones. Warm, somehow surreal memories, blurred by time and tinged with the sketchiness of haphazard recollection, but still there, and somehow the truth of them is more concrete than the actual occurrence of events.
It was a sunset for the ages, a childhood-defining evening when the sun is no longer the intense white-out of high noon but instead a fiery incandescent orb on the horizon, seemingly about to crash into the earth before being swallowed whole by the hills surrounding our home. The sky had lost all hints of the brilliant blue of a July afternoon and had morphed into transcendent shades of pink and orange before fading into inky blackness. I sat on the picnic table in our backyard, watching fireflies wink in and out of existence and listening to the crickets sing softly with the grass between my toes. The air was still and heavy with the smell of summer. The reverie was broken only by my Grandfather easing open the screen door and sitting quietly beside me in time. We are alone in the universe. Grandfather (never Grandpa or Granddad, always Grandfather) said nothing for what felt like an eternity as the lightning bugs waltzed across the lawn. He turned slowly to look at me.
“Andrew, what are you going to be when you grow up?”
The question didn't strike me as odd at the time, and even in later years I attached no particular significance to it. Only now does the distinction of “going to be” versus “want to be” become apparent, as though he had some knowledge of the turmoil, hesitation, and lack of confidence that will come to define my adolescence. Perhaps he sees himself in me (though how could he? I was four.), and perhaps his phrasing means nothing at all, but in this one instant his language becomes both symbolic and seared into my memory for all time to come.
Since I can remember, my family and I have wandered from place to place, settling in one location no longer than three or four years for seemingly no reason apart from restlessness. Like the fireflies, our location is fixed for only a moment before reappearing somewhere else. As I grew up, I didn't think of this reality as strange until I found myself in a place surrounded by people who had been living in the same house, in the same town, for their entire lives. This was more than surprising. It was shocking. I found myself reaching for something, anything about myself that could be as permanent as them.
After years of living in Canada, my father was hired by a company in Seattle, and my family of nomads uprooted again to a new country. I arrived in the United States a foreigner, an outsider. Eleven years old and alone, totally unsure of my convictions besides my favourite hockey team, I found the struggle to find acceptance with another new set of peers more painful and terrifying than ever before.
The world can be a scary place for a kid, and that first harrowing day of 6th grade was as terrifying as hearing the news of my grandfather's death four years previously. It's a bright April morning, a dawn that might very well be remembered by many as glorious. To me, the bright sunlight is as heavy as January twilight on my face as I walk into my new school. The teachers are kind, and the students are curious, but they might as well have been granite statues. I ignore them, trying to sink into the floor. I'm directed to sit at an empty desk, next to a blonde girl who stares at me like I have antennae growing from my head. There's a sheet of paper on the desk, still warm from the printer. Ms. Marrs, the teacher, stands in front of everyone and announces in a friendly tone:
“Class, we have a new student! This is Andrew. He's joining us a bit late in the year, but let's all try and help him get used to our routine. Now, please, will everyone stand to recite the pledge of allegiance. Andrew, I know you're from Canada, so I printed out a copy so you can learn it.”
In an instant, thirty pairs of eyes are boring into the back of my head. I turn the paper over in horror and stare at the words on the page, giving the illusion of reading but all I can see is a class that has now singled me out. Although Ms. Marrs means well, she clearly doesn't remember the pure dread of being somebody different in grade school. I try and follow along as the rest of the class recites the pledge dutifully, but my heart seems to have stopped dead somewhere in the vicinity of the back of my throat.
The rest of the day passes without any of the terrifying exposure of that first five minutes. Anxiety becomes boredom as the focus shifts from an unwanted spotlight to the tedium of learning things that I've already learned at another school. When I get home that night, I lie to my parents when they ask how school was. Later, sitting upstairs in my room, I pull the sheet of paper with the pledge on it from my book bag and quickly memorize the words. Tomorrow morning, there will be no spotlight. Instead, I'll be back facing that class of hostile eyes with a single purpose: blend in. I recite the pledge the next morning, and every morning after that for six years.
That summer night with my Grandfather is one of the only times in my memory where I have complete confidence in knowing myself without fear of standing out or being in a spotlight. Maybe this is because the only person watching is somebody I trust implicitly. Maybe it is because this scene is so surreal, and universally real at the same time. Maybe it is because at this stage of my life I hadn't been forced into that position of redefining myself in front of a hostile environment. Regardless of why, what happened is true. I answer his question about my future without hesitation or deliberation. While other kids at that age would undoubtedly have said something like “a dinosaur” or “a fireman”, I instead answered his question with the first and most natural thing that came into my head.
“I'm going to be a storyteller.”
It is my own language this time which surprises me. I don't say “author”, or “writer”, or “novelist”, but “storyteller”, the essence of which I couldn't possibly grasp at that age. Or maybe, perhaps, I had grasped it, and only in later years had I really lost the meaning amidst the struggle to blend in.
Grandfather asked me to tell him a story, and I did. I invented wildly, weaving a tale of pirates and dragons, of strange and wonderful things. And it was this act that made my answer the truth. Not an author or a novelist but simply, truly, a storyteller. Years later, I am not a novelist, but I am a storyteller.
comments are nice, I'm turning this in on thursday.