Today I am sharing a personal essay I wrote a few years ago while I was attending a memoir writing workshop. We were asked to think of an image and write about it. It was my grandson’s birthday yesterday and I am thinking about being a grandfather and trying to understand and relate to my own grandfather that I did not know very well or understand.
I also spent some time on the phone today speaking with the piano technician who is working to restore an 1892 Steinway upright grand piano that I inherited from my grandparents. In the meantime I am starting to practice playing piano again on a small electric piano. I have a collection of hymnal sheet music and I recently borrowed a hymnal from my church to learn some of the songs that I have grown to love.
The piano technician asked me if I wanted a museum restoration of the piano or just to get it back to playing condition. I will never be a concert pianist so I chose the latter.
I hope you enjoy the essay.
Grandfather’s Sled
Whenever I play a hymn on the piano I think of my grandfather.
I have only ever seen one photo of my grandfather as a young boy. It was taken in North Dakota when he was 10 or 11 years old. In it he is standing next to a wooden sled with a medium sized dog tethered to it like an Eskimo dog sled.
My Grandfather is wearing a plaid wool jacket that I imagine is red and black like my father’s Filson hunting jacket and a fur lined cap with ear flaps pulled down. I try to imagine him as a boy with a dog like I was at that age.
Was he out playing in the snow? Did the dog bark at him playfully? Was his father smiling as he took the photo? Or was it his mother holding the camera?
In this photo I try to find his innocence. I try to imagine my grandfather smiling and laughing, and making up heroic stories to tell at the dinner table about the adventures he and his dog had that day.
I wonder what kind of imagination this desolate landscape inspired in him?
Shortly after that photo was made his father died unexpectedly and his mother moved west to Washington state. My grandfather was forced to leave his dog behind.
My mind drifts back from that photograph and returns to my own memories of him: sternly gripping my arm like a vice as he forced me up to a porch to sing a church hymn to a stranger in a wheelchair.
The family mythology about my grandfather is that he quit school in 9th grade after his mother remarried and worked hard labor jobs most to pay rent to his stepfather. Somewhere along the way he found religion and married my grandmother.
He built the two story house my father grew up in out of scrap lumber he got from a torn down building. He pulled and straightened every nail to reuse it. He couldn’t afford a concrete foundation so he built it right on top of the dirt. It is still standing.
By the time I knew him he had moved to Los Angeles where I was born and was working as a preacher who thought the baptists were too liberal. I remember going to a church service with him where he sang hymns louder than anyone else. You could tell he had remnants of a nice tenor voice but it had grown very hoarse from years of inhaling sawdust working for a floor refinishing company. After the hymn he would preach with such intensity that it scared me.
I would walk to my grandparents after school and stay there until my father came to get me. During the summer break I would go there most days since both my parents worked full time.
My grandmother would play with me while my grandfather was away going door to door in the neighborhood passing out religious tracts and down to the harbor docks preaching to the seaman from India as they came off the ships for shore leave.
I would spend hours trying to find the thimble my grandmother hid somewhere while she sat there sewing with a smirk on her face saying “cold” or “hot” to let me know if I was getting close to finding it. As soon as my grandfather came home in the afternoon my grandmother became silent.
It was like a light switch had been flipped off. One moment I’d be sitting in her warm lap barely staying awake as she read me a story and the next moment she would stiffen as the door opened and he entered the room. Without saying a word he would immediately go to the windows and pull down the blinds to darken the room and then he would remove the clip on tie he wore and would lay down on the floor flat on his back and immediately go to sleep. This happened every day like clockwork. He would still be sleeping when my father got there and I would slip out the door and down the stairs quietly so I wouldn’t wake him.
We moved back to Washington State when I was 9 and I only saw my grandparents 3 more times after that.
The street I had lived on in LA was filled with kids but now I was suddenly living on a dirt road with my own kind of desolation. My parents finally let me have a dog when I was 14 and I would roam the Moran and Glenrose prairie all day and get home in time for dinner.
When my grandparents came to visit my grandfather didn’t seem to like dogs and he was mostly silent unless he was waking me up in the middle of the night to lecture me about a bible verse and sing a hymn.
Remembering all of this makes me think about how history seems to always be repeating itself. There seems to be a pattern that runs through a family and traits that get passed down from one generation to the next unconsciously.
I’m actually the fifth generation to have the same first name of Ira. My father told me he was so excited to have a son that he named me after himself… but did he really? By making me the fifth generation to bear the same name I wonder if he was really just passing down the legacy of involuntary as well as self inflicted hardships.
Some years ago right after I had gone through a second divorce, my father talked me into driving him back to North Dakota to visit the small town my grandfather had grown up in and to visit the graves of the first two generations of men in my family named Ira.
I didn’t know much about my father’s childhood because my dad didn’t talk much about it and usually responded to my questions about it by saying he didn’t remember.
But as we got past Montana and worked our way across North Dakota the stories flooded out of him. It turns out this trip was a repeat of a trip he had taken with his father.
At a diner I met an elderly woman who had lived in North Dakota her whole life. I asked her about the winters and what it was like to grow up there.
She described the sub zero whiteouts and the need to run a rope line between the house and the well because people would get disoriented and wander off in blindness and die from hypothermia because they couldn’t find their way back.
Being farmland and plains without forests of trees, the wind would howl through the clapboard siding into the house and her family would have to get buckets of water from the well and splash it on the side of the house so that it would freeze and the ice would block the wind getting inside. She talked about how those times tempered the spirit and how they wouldn’t see their neighbors except for at school or at church on Sundays.
I found the church that my grandfather had attended as a child. I thought he had always been a baptist but it turns out he had gone to a Lutheran church.
I go to a Lutheran church too. I’m not very religious but ended up going there with my first wife who was half Norwegian and Swedish. Our son was baptized there. I remember the first service I attended and the quizzical faces that looked back at me when I introduced myself as Ira.
It was December and these men were wearing Norwegian sweaters with reindeer and snowflake patterns and were asking me why someone with my name would be attending a Lutheran church instead of a synagogue?
Other than my father and grandfather I had never met another Ira until I was an adult. The only place you were likely to meet another Ira was in a New York jewish neighborhood.
My son’s mother stopped going after the divorce but I ended up staying on because I found it comforting and grew to appreciate the community and their love of conversation over coffee.
Standing outside the Lutheran church in North Dakota I wondered if my grandfather had been asked about his name too?
Nobody was at the church but I could look through the window and see the pews and an old piano. I could imagine a small group of people standing and singing hymns in unison. I think the hymns must have given them strength to persevere through the long winters. I think the hymns must have given my grandfather strength to face the pain of his existence.
There are many parallels between my grandfather and me even though I didn’t know him very well. I seem to have the same work ethic and tenacity in the face of adversity. I’m told I can be rigorous and intimidating although I try to temper it with warmth and kindness. I struggle to understand who he really was as I struggle to find the keys for the notes written on the sheet music.
I try to learn these hymns as a way of trying to get to know him better in hopes that I can come to terms with the legacy I have inherited.
I don’t have that picture of my grandfather but I do have a photograph of my son and that same sled. My father asked me to make this portrait of him and his grandson. It was after he had repainted the sled and they took it to Manito Park for the first time.
The other kids on the hill laughed at the antique sled. They weren’t laughing when they saw how fast those old metal runners took him down the hill. I’m glad my son enjoyed the sled and I am glad he isn’t too disappointed that I didn’t name him Ira.
I am proud that he is making his own life on his own terms and that the legacy he has inherited is a one of happiness.
Ira
PS – Here is my favorite hymn.