-‘Peace be Still’, by Candy Christmas plays-
“As once I was, I shall never be. As now I am, I shall ever be.”
-Jerry Lewis Olliff, aka “Granitehead”
Good morning, Vietnam. Thank you, to each and every one of you, for being here today. I hope this afternoon finds you well, but I also hope it finds you honest. That’s what it takes to have an audience with Papa. Throughout this presentation I have included excerpts from my own personal writing ‘I Will the Machine’- I can’t think of a more genuine way to fulfill the honor of commanding the memory of him. Personally, I don’t like a world without his sharp commentary very much. Potentially to everyone’s dismay, I hope to take some of that for myself. I had asked him in an email over the winter if he would give me the grace to write about him as it pertained to telling my own story and he replied, I quote, “just don’t cuss me out.”
Well, game on.
My name is Genna. I’m Jerry’s granddaughter, and daughter of his fourth child, Beverly. He asked me last summer to do this, as he did for my grandmother, aware of his mortality but with a muted confidence in his voice that his time wasn’t coming soon. He said that if I was to accept, that we would talk about it more. That was the last time we met face to face, and we never were able to talk about it. Still, he is in this room with us, and while I speak to you with words guided only by my own spirit now, I am speaking to him today as well. I am 28-years-old, and even as he stood in as a second father to me, I didn’t have enough time as a comprehending, mature adult to develop much more than a childlike, but not childish, perception of him. My memory of him is frozen, firmly anchored in the time when he and my grandmother were home to me.
We went a spell without communicating in the past several years, mostly by my choosing, because I am, by my own quote, “a desperate engine that will not stop”, a human locomotive that barrels forward regardless of the will of anyone else, and sometimes that left us both billowing steam as our iron wills clashed. After he attended the visitation of my paternal grandfather last year, what was ultimately the only important thought was shared- we missed each other. I now live in Missouri and coming back home isn’t as easy as it used to be, but soon after we met for dinner and caught up. I provided him the explanation for my absence and… he conceded. I let down my pride, and he met me there. Since then, we had emailed back and forth about this and that, and in one of those messages I wrote “I miss you, and I am always worried about running out of time.” That was March 27th. On April 29th, I received the message about him being in a bad way while I was riding my bicycle on the Katy Trail, a rail-trail that follows the track of the abandoned Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, to Jefferson City, Missouri. It was an exciting plan for me, 300-miles round trip, and I had previously talked with Papa about my love for that trail, how I had ridden it end to end, and broken the women’s fastest-known-time record with four fresh stitches in my knee. Telling him that story was the first time in a really long time that I had seemed to exceed his expectations for me. I had sent him a link to my GPS this time and let him know that the following weekend I’d be at his house to watch the Kentucky Derby, getting back to a tradition that had been tabled for too long.
By the time I was riding back from Jefferson City, two days later, we were all coming to grips with the reality that Papa was going to be boarding toward heaven soon, on that long black train to be with my grandma. My friends and family, asking my heart to work so hard while it was breaking is my inspiration for this writing. The ghosts of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas engines assisted me home that day.
Feel the rolling on the rails as we listen to ‘Country Train’, James Last, a song that has stuck with me since the last time I heard him play it on a roadtrip. It has no lyrics, so use this opportunity to gather your own memories and I will open the floor to anyone who would like to share a story, an apology, or simply something you may have wanted to say before and ran out of time.
If you knew Papa well, you might consider this as your chance to get your words in without any rebuttal. If anyone has anything written that you haven’t already given to me, you may bring it to me now to read on your behalf.
-‘Country Train’ plays-
Firstly, we have a story from Andrea, grandaughter:
Papa had accepted an invitation to a hotdog roast at her home, in nearby Central. When dessert time came, the fixins for s’mores were brought out, with extra-large marshmallows replacing the standard size. Papa, overzealous as he sometimes was, combined two of those with his portion, and the immediate consequence was him wearing molten marshmallow as an unsolicited boutonneire. “I’ve never made a s’more before,” he said. I suppose he had s’more to learn.
Leanne, daughter, shares this:
Both she and Papa were seated on his tractor- he was teaching her to drive it. He paused. Suddenly, the task at hand was significantly less important in his mind than dismounting to chase a black racer snake through the grass in an attempt to catch it, leaving Leanne on the tractor to watch. He evidently lost. It’s safe to say any atheticism in our family did not come from him if he can’t win a footrace with something that has no legs.
I will now turn the mic over to Travis, Papa’s former colleage at Rohm & Haas, for his contribution.
If anyone else would like to speak, please rise.
Papa was honest, critical even, and rather unfiltered except for the sake of humor. For example, when you asked him what happened to the pointer finger that he was half-missing, you couldn’t easily get the real or consistent answer on that one. The story I remember the most clearly was that he traded it in a transaction for a trained hunting dog the owner wanted an arm and a leg for, so he just settled for a pup. I am unaware if that story came before or after the beagle he aptly named “Stubby.” When asked by someone else, he said he lost it in some unholy story about grabbing a buck by the- WAIT, he asked me not to cuss… Aw, heck.
I spent my most impressionable and vulnerable years with Papa and Grandma. With 14 acres of land to run unabashedly, I drew energy from the golden hours, the cedar trees, the bellowing bull frogs, and the shrill of wild but shy coyotes.
It was picture day, first grade. I remember my little blue dress being caught in the barbed wire fence across the road when the bus dropped me off at my parent’s house, but nobody was home. I freed myself, and ran panicked and crying and tripped through the tall grass of my grandparents’ field toward their house. It was only a half mile or so wide but I felt small enough to be carried away by a red-tail if it saw me.
The earth between the barbed-wire borders of McPhillip’s road was where stability lived; since then my feralness was fostered there too. I flung my distressed little self through the door of their house, where they quieted me and I was again sitting in the sunroom gazing through north-facing windows. I looked out past the field, and the evil fence, at the house that I had arrived to, but didn’t quite recognize as home- the house that my next memory of is watching from that same window as it was being hollowed out by fire.
In all of the time that I spent at his house, running loose on his property with just myself or with my cousins and my little sister, Sierra, until his long-draw “supper’s ready!” I asked him questions about everything. If he didn’t know the answer, he would find it. My curiosity matched his.
I had travelled with him on many a road trip, and heard so many classic stories between him and the people he met or reunited with on our trips, and although he won’t be here to read or spectate when any more of my own story is written or told, I’ve long wanted it to be one that fascinated him on equal grounds. He was a challenge to impress, and for that reason I’ll never be complacent either.
Papa, I take this opportunity to challenge you openly, again. You’ve said a number of times that I’m too sensitive. This isn’t a unique criticism, but it was more difficult to brush off from you, because you are one of the few people in my life who I really wanted my pursuit of happiness to vicariously please. That sensitivity was information for you, that you mattered. Your approval mattered. Hearing you laugh at my wit, taking pause as you processed something unexpected I had said, and feeling that I was trusted with the sanctity of my own wellbeing despite doing everything the wrong way… mattered. It all comes from the same place. Sensitivity could be seen as weakness in a tumultuous world like ours, but I think that is also what it takes to shake the room. I’m not interested in armour. I taught me to be kinda soft, you taught me to be kinda viscious, when to not take any… scat. It is the reason I could so meticulously choose my words for this. The willingness to forgive, relive, to gather and show our humility is the reason we are here right now. The only other thing that we needed to graple with the suddenness of this is you. You were right, when you repeatedly took pause after leaving the bathroom and said “there is something about an Aqua Velva man”. I am convinced that you single-handedly kept that aftershave on the shelves for almost 100-years. You are the reason we all got into trouble, but not more than you could get us out of. You are the reason my sister, my dad, and I pulled roughly 1000 vinyl records I told you I wanted to save out of that collapsing old house. You are the curator of hoards of text on our family tree, unprompted nature fun-facts, out-of-context letters from a time long-gone, and obscure recipes from down south. You might be the inspiration, or the last straw, that drove a couple of people in this room to jump out of perfectly good airplanes. You’re the reason we had a mother and a grandmother like Kate. And according to you, you’re the reason the saying goes “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”
-Pause-
None of us were ready. I am convinced he wasn’t either. However, may we each take a breath and release our tension, knowing that he is home, with the magnolias in bloom and the spanish moss swaying in a gentle Georgia wind, reuinited with Grayson, Grandma Sauls, Kate, Stubby, everyone he ever or never met whose grave he found as he followed our ancestry, his oceans-wide tally of friends gone before him, and his missing finger.
We will listen to another song by James Last, ‘Music from Across the Way’, chosen specifically because he marked this song on the sleeve of his record with a checkmark and “good” next to it.
I choose to believe that this was you, Papa, having just a little bit of say-so. This isn’t Burger King, but have it your way.
-‘Music from Across the Way’ plays-
I will the machine. 