Until I was about 7, I thought my grandfather’s name was “Dearest”. My grandmother, Mommom, would always refer to him as “Dearest” and say things like, “It’s time for supper, Dearest”. He was a strong man. Shorter, but strong. Poppop was retired when I knew him and spent most of his days running errands in his pickup, fixing things in the garage, or in the basement, where there always seemed to be electrical equipment in some sort of disrepair across two long work benches he’d made. I never knew what he was doing down there, but it seemed very technical. One of my earliest memories is sitting on his lap watching TV. He had big belly. I remember it rocking me as it expanded with each breath. Maybe I was making it hard for him to breath. If so, he never let on. He just let me sit there, leaning on him while he struggled for breath. Poppop was bald. I once asked him what happened to his hair and he said Mommom had given him a haircut and it never grew back. I believed him. He laughed. Poppop was quiet. The only thing I distinctly remember him saying was grace before every meal. He always said the same prayer - “ Good lord, we thank you for the food we are about to receive, in Christ’s name redeemer, Amen”. Always short and sweet. He said it so many times that he would just mumble it. My grandmother was the Christian. She ushered at Church on Sundays and went every week. My grandfather never joined. I assume he had stopped making excuses long before I came around. Poppop’s real name was Marion. My grandmother was Marian. Together, Marion and Marian had 5 children (2 girls + 3 boys), my mother being the oldest. They raised their family at the end of Evergreen Avenue, in a grey stone house that Poppop had built. Legend has it that he also helped build the Delaware Memorial Bridge, the one that connects Salem County to Wilmington. I think about him every time I cross it. As a kid, one of the best parts of that house was a shack deep in the backyard where Poppop stored what seemed like 15 salvaged bikes, all for his grandkids to ride up/down Evergreen Ave when they visited. There was a bike appropriate for each age. We all measured how big we were getting by which bike we could ride. My first ride with no training wheels was on the blue one. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was probably 4. I spent a night at Mommom and Poppop’s and had a dream that night that I could do it. I woke up the next morning, went straight back to the shack, somehow freed the blue bike from the tangle of rims/handle bars, walked it out front to the street, and just started riding. No one else was there. Just me. We loved going to that house, especially in the summer when Aunt Shirley and my cousins would come up from Tennessee. Nothing was more exciting than that week in the summer. Kids everywhere, coming out of almost every house on Evergreen, where all my grandparent’s neighbors were also grandparents. Poppop seemed to love the commotion, since it likely gave him more things to fix and more hands to handle his daily chores. Mommom was the disciplinarian.
Poppop passed away in 1999 after deteriorating health caused by stroke. He was 83 years old. The last time I saw him he had lost a lot of weight and one of his legs which had been amputated. He found God at the end.
A.P.C., Cape Town, 2019