His obituary.
A few labels to identify him by:
Re: the last (and most glamorous) label. He transported livestock, in the 1940s, to war-ravaged Greece.
This portrait is from a 2014 “seagoing cowboy” reunion.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
He was best known as a missionary to Ecuador.
He lived in Esmeraldas and evangelized throughout the rustic northwestern provinces. He’d walk many miles from little town to little town.
The church published this condolence:
(The verse is actually
Psalm 116:15. Here, in the
Reina-Valera translation,
estimada – like
precious in the
KJV and
NIV – means
costly. Compare:
Mucho le cuesta al Señor ver morir a los que lo aman [this translation is
Dios Habla Hoy]. The basic idea is the same as in “Jesus wept.”)
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
He was the grandparent I knew best … the one near whom I lived longest … and the one who took me with him on several long trips (to Panama and Jamaica, and around Ecuador).
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
He was the grandparent who’d discuss literature and movies with me. I’ll dwell on this at some length. Grandpa was a humane man. His Christianity certainly touched everything about him. But his faith wasn’t the only thing that made him humane.
I trust the other tribute-givers to highlight his more overtly spiritual qualities.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
He disagreed – respectfully, if somewhat impishly – with my rather bloodthirsty literary tastes.
Once, having read the Lambs on Shakespeare, I was going on about
Macbeth (or whatever). Grandpa was unimpressed.
I think that when Shakespeare makes someone die, it’s because he has no further use for him.
That’s quite a notion to put to a second-grader. I’ve been mulling it over, ever since.
He didn’t care for Agatha Christie, either. The murders were too gleeful.
The detective story that I like best – he meant
“A Scandal in Bohemia” –
is a sentimental tale, in which the detective falls in love.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
But his was a sin-conscious romanticism. He was keenly attuned to grades of evil and redemption.
I told him, when I was reading
Huck Finn, that I imagined Huck’s father to be like the drunkard in
Hoosiers.
No, no, much worse, he said.
It was an enlightening correction.
Once, we watched a series of Disney movies together (he was looking after us children while our parents were out of town). He enjoyed the movies’ wit. But, to his own surprise, he was deeply moved by
Beauty and the Beast.
I thank you, Father – he prayed with us that night –
that you have made it possible for people to change.
He had no use for such movies as
Kind Hearts and Coronets, with its casual, cynical violence, or
Inherit the Wind, which treats an entire society as contemptibly cartoonish.
Not that he disliked cartoons as such: he relished
1066 and All That, Flannery O’Connor, and
Peanuts.
As an adult, I lent him
David Michaelis’s biography of Charles Schulz. He returned it with profuse thanks.
I enjoyed it very much, he said,
that is, until Schulz’s life went off the rails.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I spent college vacations at his house. I’d catch him sneaking into my room, returning furtively borrowed novels by Kenzaburo Oe or J. M. Coetzee. Some he liked, some he didn’t. I could tell what he thought of a novel by how he put it on the shelf.
Of Coetzee’s
Michael K, he said:
This book describes a redemption that even a severely limited man can attain.
His own daily life was disarmingly simple. I believe he once seriously considered retiring to a trailer house. For lunch, he’d open a can of beans, or he’d take me down the street to Wendy’s, where he was content to eat a baked potato. His love for the underdog was almost fanciful. Hence his delight in such charmers as
The Mouse that Roared and – to his family’s considerable amusement –
Baby’s Day Out, which he first saw in Ecuador, on a bus. (I’ve already mentioned
Hoosiers.)
He also liked novels that told the story of a life (the odd Dickens or George Eliot) or that described rural societies that preceded or coincided with his own (Stowe, Twain, Tarkington, Stratton-Porter, Rawlings; he was raised in Indiana but also spent time, as a youngster, in Florida). I believe his favorite book in Spanish was a rural idyll called
El camino – most likely, the one by
Miguel Delibes.
He spoke and wrote beautifully. I was in high school when I began, consciously, to pattern my syntax and cadence after his.
If I strain after a turn of phrase, it’s because I merely imitate, all-too-imperfectly, what came naturally to my exemplar.
The same is true of many of his descendants, in their respective pursuits.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
He died on Friday morning, of a heart attack. He’d turned ninety-seven the previous day. His widow, my step-grandma, is my sole remaining grandparent; my grandma died in 1991.
