Grandfathers are fathers who are grand.
- Nicholas Gordon
Memories are funny things. Shape-shifters, they change over time, until they are mere shadows of what actually was. As recollections of people or events grow fuzzier around the edges, it can sometimes be a shock to stop and actually consider the passage of time. Most of us don’t do this very often. It hurts too much to see what we’ve lost – our figures, our hair, our friends, or our family. But every now and then certain things will trigger a memory, or memories, and we are hopelessly lost in them, all of the vivid details replaying with cinematic perfection in our minds, until, for sanity’s sake, we pull ourselves out of it and back into reality.
Recently I was reminded that it had been twenty years since my high school graduation. Quite frankly, I could have gone without *that* reminder, but, there it was, about as avoidable as my next appointment for hair color, or the need for more fiber in my diet. I’d been doing some heavy reflecting on that ominous phrase “twenty years”, when it occurred to me with a shock that it’s been just over twenty years since my grandfather passed away. So impossible to think that such a large chunk of time should pass so quickly…so amazing to think that I am so far removed from who and where I was then. My mind raced to remember his face, almost as if in fear that I would forget what he looked like…
He was a Sicilian man, not too tall, or too broad, but with the darkest hair and the bluest eyes that you’d ever seen. By the time I remember him, his dark hair had faded to silver, his blue eyes and pencil thin mustache putting him on par with a mature Paul Newman. He could flash a smile on cue, and looking at his “cheesy grin” in photos, twenty years later, is like a balm for my soul. But he was not a man of mild temper, and my sister and I occasionally had to duck the stray shoe that was thrown our way when we were particularly trying his patience. The most important thing about Liborio Salvatore Traina was that he was always there when we needed him, which, in retrospect, was quite often. But how many times do we realize things like that when we need to? When we can actually make a difference by saying “thank you”?
When my grandparents retired to Florida, as all self-respecting New Yorkers are required to do, my mother and sister and I headed south with them. Once we were settled in Merritt Island, our lives became intertwined like the honeysuckle vines that grew on the back fence of Liborio’s well-tended house on South Courtney Parkway. We were dropped off at their house each morning, where we would eat breakfast before walking or biking the short distance to Tropical Elementary School. Cold cereal? F’getabout it – we not only had a hot breakfast cooked by Grandpa himself, (usually pancakes or eggs), we even got homemade hot cocoa and fresh-squeezed orange juice to go along with it. We also got free entertainment – Grandpa had an inventory of vaudevillian songs in his head, which would pop out when he was cooking breakfast, or driving the car, or just generally feeling happy. A favorite of his featured the long-suffering Old Testament hero Moses, but didn’t exactly have church-approved lyrics:
Holy Moses, king of the Jews,
Sold his wife for a pair of shoes;
And when the shoes the began to wear,
The king of the Jews began to swear!
He got a lot of mileage out of that one. It took many years and a lot of Charlton Heston to get my mental image of Moses back where it was supposed to be. Sometimes he would do “The Charleston” dance for us, with a frying pan full of eggs in one hand. This was no small feat, considering that to do an effective Charleston one needs both hands in motion. I guess the Charleston would get him thinking about the good old days of the Roaring Twenties, because then he would lapse into a rousing rendition of, “Five foot two, eyes of blue, cootchie, cootchie, cootchie coo, Has anybody seen my gal?”
After school we would walk or ride our bikes back to their house, and usually one of two things would happen - either a jaunt to the beach or a quick fishing trip on the banks of the river near Cape Canaveral. The smell of the marshes and the fresh bait still assaults my nostrils these twenty years later. Grandpa liked to think of himself as a fisherman, he even bought a boat, but about the most exciting thing that I ever saw him catch was an eel. I was quite traumatized by the sight of it, wriggling for dear life on the end of that hook, with a trickle of eel-blood oozing from its mouth. Many times we caught blowfish, which could convince us to throw them back in just by puffing up and acting fierce (for a fish, anyway). (The eel wasn’t so lucky – he became bait.) No, Grandpa’s fishing was definitely not to put supper on the table, I think in his mind it was the ideal pastime for a retiree.
A friendly and talkative guy, he would make new friends at the pier, or the beach, or over the backyard fence. During one trip to the beach, we met a man, a retired man like Grandpa, who was convinced that the Apollo moon landings were staged. This was a fairly radical view in the 1970’s on Florida’s “Space Coast”, and Grandpa quietly steered me away from the man, shaking his head sadly at his apparent senility. Since then I’ve seen a PBS special on that very same topic, and I wonder just what it was that he knew and we didn’t. But most of the time he just met normal people, doing what retirees do in Florida – enjoying themselves.
Amazingly, at one time my grandfather owned seven little rental homes, that he would paint, fix up here and there, and then either rent or resell. “Handyman Specials” he called them, and many a morning my sister and I could be found with a paintbrush in our hands and paint in our hair, helping him clean up a home. One of his homes, a block away from where my mother, sister and I lived in the “Merritt Ridge” subdivision, was rented by a couple who remain known to me now only as “The Hippies”. (Remember, this was 1973.) The Hippies skipped out in the middle of the night, presumably because they couldn’t pay their rent, and Liborio was left with a house with its walls painted black, beads hanging where the doors once were, and from my sister’s and my perspective, lots of cool hippie stuff. The walls that weren’t black were decorated with the oh-so-70’s yellow “happy face” and huge flowers. If memory serves me correctly, it took about five coats of Sears’s best paint to cover those walls. Eventually, it became more work than it was worth, and all the homes were gone.
Liborio was not one to sit idle for long, however. Today, we would refer to it as “A.D.D.”, but back in those naïve days, all we could say was, “He’s got ants in his pants.” During summer vacations, when he didn’t have to be there for us before and after school, he would pack us into his yellow Dodge Dart Swinger, and just drive. The destination was not important. The route was not important. What was important was the open road and the feeling of freedom that he felt on those road trips. We feel fairly certain that he must have had at least some Gypsy blood coursing through his veins, but we didn’t dare question him on it at the time. Once he got that look in his eye, it was almost inevitable that we would hear, “Let’s go to Miami!” and off we would go, with barely a flicker of a reason for such a trek. Once we even drove the seven hours to Key West, looked around, and then drove right back home again. I can’t claim to understand what made him do this. Maybe retired life was too neat and orderly, maybe he was looking for something to keep his senses alert. I really don’t think he knew why he did it either. He just knew that he had to get out of the house and on the road.
On a more practical note, he was quite the gardener. He took the liberty of creating a huge garden in the empty lot next to his house. You name it, he grew it. He even built himself a mini greenhouse, with plastic tarp on its sides, where he worked whatever gardening magic was in order. Tomatoes, all kinds of peppers, oranges, grapefruit, radishes, carrots, papayas, mangos, kale and even bananas all flourished under his care. What we didn’t eat, he gave to the neighbors. Inevitably, some of the produce made its way to Liborio’s culinary creations, his homemade pizza standing out as the most memorable.
Grandpa had a knack for quoting what he told us was Shakespeare. At any given moment he might ask, “You know what William Shakespeare said, don’t you?” There was never a correct answer to this question. It could be anything from, “Children should be seen and not heard” to “Senior citizens have a right to throw shoes,” neither of which, we would realize, worked out in our favor. But one of his favorite expressions was, “Time and tide waits for no man.” I didn’t understand it at the time, and just chalked it up to another Liborio quote, but now the meaning couldn’t be any clearer. Time marched on, we left Merritt Island and moved to Texas, and I never got a chance to thank him. For the fun. For the eggs and bacon and hot cocoa. For the road trips. For the stories. For the discipline. And for simply being there. Funny how the existence of one person can have such a lasting impact. Twenty years later, the memories are still clear and intact, preserved for eternity in my mind.
