Remembering Puppy

I realized while reading a book, that when I die, I will be the last person to remember my grandfather. He had been dead several years by the time my brother was born. Because I was little, I am not sure of how much I remember and how much was told to me.

He was an engineer, brilliant. When he took the qualifying exam at the State House he was told he hadn’t passed. He went in and asked to see the exam. He had answered every question right.

I called him Puppy, and have been told I was the only thing that muffled his gruffness and lack of tact. “Looks like a God damned Jew,” he said about one of my mother’s friend’s baby. He would not have done well in the PC age.

However, with me, he played marbles even making a special rack with holes and numbers that I could shoot the marbles through. He beat me at tiddlywinks and pretended to be Freddie Bobbsey to my Flossie.

“Why go on vacation. I am here,” he would say and descend into his garden, that I am told was laid out with a precision that would stop corn from growing one centimeter out of line from the other ears. Until he died, I never ate a bought vegetable. My grandmother canned everything we didn’t consume fresh. I thought the only part of asparagus you ate were the tips. At the cost of asparagus today, I now eat the whole thing.

He joked about saving money on a grave. “Just plant me in the garden and when the tomatoes come up better than ever you can say, that’s Walter.” My grandmother opted for a conventional grave in the city of Malden. On Memorial and Labor Days we would go and she would plant flowers.

I was nine when we went on one of these excursions. Parking the car we walked to the family tombstone. My grandmother stopped suddenly, dropping her trowel and started to cry. Where my grandfather was buried was a huge tomato plant covered with beefsteak tomatoes.