Grandfather

While walking in the desert I remembered my grandfather. He had come to the US a recent engineering graduate from Kiev, met my grandmother, a grocer's daughter, who later would give birth to my mother; worked as a metallurgist in the steel industry in Pittsburgh and Columbus, and was ill with diabetes and marrow cancer for the time I knew him, dying when I was twelve.

When I was about seven, my little brother and young parents took rail to Columbus from Pittsburgh, a great thrill. 

He spoke to me always with respect, answering my questions about lightning, the workings of television, government and geography, dinosaurs and much more that I don't recall. On Sundays in Columbus we'd sometimes watch the Yankee games on his 1950's seven inch cabinet TV.

Once he gave me a lesson in chemistry titration by taking me to the bathroom and having me hold a test tube, partly filled with the urine I had watched him void into it, adding reagent drop by drop until the color change told him how high his sugar level was. I remember how warm the test tube felt in my hands, and my queasiness, not quite dispelled by his gentle manner. I watched him, propped up in a hospital bed, inject his belly and thighs with insulin; I can still recall his ashen face, the smell of the alcohol swabs in his bedroom, the metallic gleam off the autoclavable syringes.

He was a short, compact man, made more sturdy looking by the steel and leather brace he wore against the ongoing deterioration of his spine. His complexion made sallow by illness. Bald, with soft gray almond eyes. A very neat grey mustache, a few coarse black hairs marking it. I never heard him raise his voice; in fact, he spoke in quiet tones that nonetheless commanded my attention. Something also that made an impression that wouldn't have been obvious to me as a child, only remembered all these years later: a calm resignation, and the strength of that.

I stopped for a moment to look out across the desert toward the western hills. The sky above them purpling and golden this late in the afternoon. Venus could be seen sailing above the horizon, a brightening light in the deep blue. I heard myself say, grandfather, how do you like the desert we live in now? He smiled with my face, looked toward the mountains through my eyes. Suffused by gratitude, I felt the stillness of the day, the gift of contact.