Letter to the generations
I am writing, grandfather, from a balcony overlooking the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Magdalena state, in Colombia. It’s a place I can barely say I’d read about before visiting, but it is beautiful. There are toucans, parrots and more hummingbirds than you can shake a stick at. They say there are more birds here than anywhere else in the world. It is as green as the American South and maybe even a bit less humid, during this, the dry season. If you can believe it, January and February are their summer, even though they’re above the equator, because for the rest of the year it rains, it rains without cease from May to September or so and while the rest of the northern hemisphere bakes here they bathe.
You have no reason to be thinking about this place. You’ve had the flu, my sister told me—I wasn’t supposed to tell you, she texted—and while things are looking up, you and I both know the jig’s nearly up. So it should not surprise you that I am thinking of you, nor strike you as unbalanced.
There’s no WiFi here. Perhaps you don’t know what that is; I am hardly sure myself. But, in any case, there is no internet here, and so while I write I’m accompanied by the same six minutes of a jazz song, “Like It Is” by Yusuf Lateef, recorded in 1968. I don’t know if you ever listened to jazz. I know you liked big band music, swing music, that you danced the square in a barn with Eleanor Roosevelt in the late thirties, when she was touring the country to keep morale up in the middle of the Depression. When you were that age you’d been sent from your family’s home to an uncle or cousin who could feed you, you told us.
I’m drinking beer here on this balcony (it’s dark now), wondering what mockery of a line could be drawn between you and me. I don’t even know if you ever drank beer. The only time you went to the tropics, this far south at all, would have been during the fighting at Attu -- or so I imagined as a child who though all Pacific warfare had been on jungle islands like Guadalcanal, before I realized Attu was practically Arctic, the westernmost island in the desolate Aleutian chain.
You told me the men drew lots to see who would clear the Japanese tunnels, that after throwing a grenade down it would be one man with a pistol and a torch. My dad said you never told him that.
You did tell us many times about the notorious woman. You always used that phrase, one of many roundabout ways you employed over the years to address subjects that weren’t always strictly up to the fearsome level of courtesy and politesse effected by my grandmother. You got your job because the old guy ran off with a notorious woman, and they needed someone right away. You happened to be there. Getting a job was a lot easier back then. You sold fertilizer and pesticide up and down the corridor from Virginia to South Carolina. I doubt the company still exists, it must have been consolidated. I wonder if you’d been born now, knowing what we know, if you’d still sell that stuff. But it’s a silly question, because you’re so clearly who you are as a result of the times that molded you. It makes me wonder how my times have shaped me, in what ways I’ll seem strange or alien to the generations I leave behind.
Of course I don’t have but the one grandfather, Grandaddy in the familial parlance. The other one was bad before he was gone and gone before he was dead. It’s by default you’re my favorite, and if there were stiffer competition perhaps I’d hold a couple issues in harsher light. But for now I see your playfulness in mine. You are philosophical without pretension. I can’t say the same for myself—after all, you have the advantage of never having been to college—but it is something to admire.
Is it a modern condition, that each of us know a world incommensurate with the one our forefathers navigated? That they make but never inhabit a present, a present, given for our benefit but entirely ignorant of our own preferences and ways of being? I don’t know. It is strange and I’m not sure I like it, this dislocation, because when you go I don’t think it’s fair to say that my father and then me and then my son will take your place. You lived an age we will never see again. From birth to death your life is a catalogue of new appliances, household chores or jobs eliminated: the refrigerator took away the milkman. The radio and television took away the paperboy. The vacuum took away the broom and mop. The first gift my father got you, he told us recently, was a microwave. That symbol of the nuclear age, the portent of atomic doom forestalled, tamed into this magic kitchen box...only for the microwave to enable decades of reheated dinners, the saddest American innovation.
Thank you for all that you’ve done to get me to this place. I am not saying I know why I’m here or what I’ll do with myself, but from the sandy shores of Wilmington, to the dinner tables in Charlotte, if we hardly traveled it didn’t mean we didn’t go anywhere. You and all my family are always with me.