wanted more story, but got kind of a lot
My maternal grandfather, Stan Shaver (jr), who usually went by Granstan (his decision, and he sometimes spelled it with the camel-case!) passed away this morning.
He'd been suffering for a while -- he had cancer, and the chemotherapy had seemed to be working pretty well, but he was in his late 80s, and after a while he just got super sick and lost a lot of weight, and once he started declining, it was pretty rapid. I last saw him in October, and he seemed fairly healthy back then, all things considered. We went for a walk on the beach with some other family members.
He was awesome, and I love him a lot. I could talk about him a fair bit, how he played the accordion, how he liked to go on fun minor adventures (and traveled broadly with my grandmother, during their retirement!), how he was awesome at Jeopardy! because he read a fair bit and was a trivia sponge (this seems to be hereditary)...
But: let me tell you a story, the abridged version of which he told me over the phone, a few weeks ago. I never got the full version.
My great-grandfather (Stan Senior) was involved in some shady real-estate deals in pre-Revolution Cuba. One such deal was that, apparently, he was selling the rights to land that either didn't exist or that he didn't own on the Isla de la Juventud (which was then called "Isle of Pines" -- what GranStan called it when he told me this story), a big island just south of the main island of Cuba. At some point -- maybe investors discovered the scam -- he fled from Florida *to* Cuba to hide out.
This was very soon after the war, and my grandfather and his mother were living in Florida, wondering when (if?) Stan Senior was going to come back. So GranStan hops a flight to Cuba to find his father. And he searched Havana, asking around if anybody had seen his father, checking the bars and the US Embassy. Stan Senior was not trying to be found, was the thing.
But eventually, he found him in a particular bar near the embassy, having been tipped off by a woman whom he had an inkling his father had been seeing...
... what I don't know -- and maybe my mom knows -- is what happened once he found his dad. I know he came back to the US eventually (though he passed before I was born), but I don't know if it was just then...
He'd been suffering for a while -- he had cancer, and the chemotherapy had seemed to be working pretty well, but he was in his late 80s, and after a while he just got super sick and lost a lot of weight, and once he started declining, it was pretty rapid. I last saw him in October, and he seemed fairly healthy back then, all things considered. We went for a walk on the beach with some other family members.
He was awesome, and I love him a lot. I could talk about him a fair bit, how he played the accordion, how he liked to go on fun minor adventures (and traveled broadly with my grandmother, during their retirement!), how he was awesome at Jeopardy! because he read a fair bit and was a trivia sponge (this seems to be hereditary)...
But: let me tell you a story, the abridged version of which he told me over the phone, a few weeks ago. I never got the full version.
My great-grandfather (Stan Senior) was involved in some shady real-estate deals in pre-Revolution Cuba. One such deal was that, apparently, he was selling the rights to land that either didn't exist or that he didn't own on the Isla de la Juventud (which was then called "Isle of Pines" -- what GranStan called it when he told me this story), a big island just south of the main island of Cuba. At some point -- maybe investors discovered the scam -- he fled from Florida *to* Cuba to hide out.
This was very soon after the war, and my grandfather and his mother were living in Florida, wondering when (if?) Stan Senior was going to come back. So GranStan hops a flight to Cuba to find his father. And he searched Havana, asking around if anybody had seen his father, checking the bars and the US Embassy. Stan Senior was not trying to be found, was the thing.
But eventually, he found him in a particular bar near the embassy, having been tipped off by a woman whom he had an inkling his father had been seeing...
... what I don't know -- and maybe my mom knows -- is what happened once he found his dad. I know he came back to the US eventually (though he passed before I was born), but I don't know if it was just then...