Jen's Column / Grandpa Farm

My grandfather is the oldest man in the world. Or, at least that’s what he’s been telling me for the last 20 years.

Every fall, when he and my grandmother would load up their sedan to make their annual trek south, he’d say, “See you in the spring, Jenny”— then add, dryly, “God willing.”

He was only half kidding — which drove me crazy. He was always certain he was too old to make it another year.
And so every year I’d tell him in exasperation that he’d be back. And every year he was. Still is. Last week, we celebrated his 90th birthday.

For the record, he thinks it’s ridiculous to reach 90. “That’s just too damn old,” he told me a few weeks ago. “Nobody should live this long.”

And I don’t blame him. The ailments that have accompanied his aging — emphysema, prostate cancer, a growing aortic aneurysm — aren’t fun. Most of his friends have died. His failing memory angers him and his hearing loss is frustrating. A broken hip — the result of a fall when he reached down to retrieve a newspaper from his driveway a few years ago — has relegated him to regular use of a walker.

Life is not as fun as it used to be. And it used to be fun.

The stories of his youth have always fascinated me. How he’d swim across Minneapolis’ Lake Calhoun to buy a hot dog. How he got into medical school after two years of undergraduate work — and dated a gaggle of nurses. How he spent time in Greenwich Village after the war — attending parties he couldn’t tell me about until I was an adult. How he met his future wife — my grandmother — as she was being wheeled into surgery for an appendectomy.

He’s the impetus of many of my childhood stories, as well. How he’d eat the curl from the top of my ice cream cone during our trips to Dairy Queen. How he’d tip his La-Z-Boy over so I could lay claim to the change he’d lost underneath. How he built me a dollhouse decorated with tiny, framed pictures of my grandmother.

Most memorably, however, my grandfather shared his love of words. When I was in grade school, he gave me a narrow book of poetry. Next to the poems he deemed important, he wrote, “25 cents,” “50 cents” or, rarely, “$1” in his familiar penciled script. When I could recite the passage from memory, he’d pay me.

I learned Donne’s No Man Is an Island. Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn. Whittier’s The Ballad of Barbara Fritchie. For an unprecedented $5, I even memorized the Greek alphabet.

I’m not sure it was an enviable skill at the time. In fact, it probably made me a bit of a weirdo. When I was ten years old, I attended a summer camp at which students had to sing a song or recite a poem to be excused for lunch. Other kids sang, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” or delivered a variation of “Roses Are Red….” I recited Leigh Hunt’s Jenny Kissed Me.

In high school, my grandfather sent me a dictionary for Christmas — and told me I should get a stand to put it on. (“You can tell something about a person who has a dictionary stand,” he said.) When I was in college, he sent me a copy of Cry the Beloved Country because, he claimed, it contained the most beautiful first page of any novel, ever. (He added, incidentally, that if I didn’t agree, I shouldn’t be an English major.)

My grandfather still ends our visits with his customary, “God willing.” Only now, there’s more truth in those words than I want to believe. I wish, of course, he could live forever. But I find some solace in the fact that the oldest man in the world has lived long enough to see his love of words continue in me.