3.18.04: Ivan Adrian ‹ Blog « Without-Feathers.com

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself…
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life

Ivan Adrian

March 18, 2004

There’s an article on my maternal grandfather at LaffInTheDark.com. A simple textual smiley cannot express my glee.

My mother has been assisting the author of this article in his research, sending him old pictures of my grandfather’s products and telling him stories about the man my grandpa was. I’ve seen the pictures before, of course, and the stories are all familiar to me. But it’s strange to see them in this context, as a happy tribute to my grandfather’s pioneering genius. I forget sometimes that he was a brilliant man.

I barely knew him, I’m sad to say. I was born too late, and I lived too far away. We spoke on the phone sometimes, but there was always someone else on another extension, someone to wriggle into the conversation and interrupt the stories and dam the flow of images and memories. It frustrated us both, and the talks would end awkwardly, neither really knowing what to say to each other, feeling a connection but not sure how to voice it. He did not share his emotions easily, and I was too sensitive to push him.

He had a mischievous sense of humor. When the family went on picnics, he would hide wax foods among the real picnic lunch and see who was fooled into taking a bite. To the neighborhood children he was a delightful enigma; he spoke a made-up language, gave the children silly nicknames, and every Halloween he built the best haunted house in the neighborhood. One infamous Thanksgiving, he hid a tape recorder in the kitchen to record the conversation of the women, who were cleaning up after the feast. When he triumphantly played back the tape for the menfolk in the living room, the recording gave forth a chattering of voices sharing stories, gossip, and tales of their husbands. The men thought it hilarious. The women were so angry they didn’t speak to him for weeks.

But this is what my mother tells me, not what I remember. The things I do remember are brief and small and precious—a familiar voice at one end of the sidewalk and the huge Florida sun sinking low in the other direction, bright as a ball of fire; the narrow, curving staircase of the house where my grandfather lived, and how he showed me how to scoot down the stairs on my bottom, just for fun; the last trip down to Florida in the late ’90s, when he wanted to talk to my mother and me but was always interrupted by someone or something. When we left at the end of our stay, we were already in the car to drive to the airport when Grandpa suddenly came out of the front door and held out his arms to my mother, and they hugged one last time. When she came back to the car she had the strangest look on her face, and later she told me that he had never done anything like that before. He was not the kind of man to show such sudden, strong emotion. It was the last time we would see him, and we all knew it.

Sometimes I dig out the old family photographs of him and study them for a long, silent time. In the photos, my grandfather’s face always bears a look of gentle, thoughtful sadness and faint surprise, as if the photographer caught him unawares. And even though I can’t quite read his eyes, there’s a definite glint in them that calls to me across the decades, and I feel my own eyes glinting back.