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Cut wood, carry water
Maurice and Madelin Xavier, my mother’s parents.
This is how I usually remember him, lounging in his chair at the south end of the kitchen table, white work shirt and tie knotted up tight against his prodigious Adam’s apple.
Or I see him peering into the back of a television in his shop out front, a pipe full of Prince Albert smouldering in the ashtray, or taking on any one of a thousand daunting tasks. Even if he was in the rough-hewn basement replacing a rotted framing timber, or climbing onto a roof to install a television aerial, I never saw him without the tie. Even cutting wood in the October frost, a plaid cloth jacket buttoned all the way up and collar popped against the wind, I knew the tie was there, and knotted. It would not have surprised me had he unbuttoned the jacket in between saw cuts to straighten it. He put another branch across the sawhorses, started cutting it to stove length with the bow saw.
“I did a little experimenting that way when I was, oh about your age, I guess. I was living in Ithaca, and I was curious, so I went to a few different kinds of churches to see what they had to say.”
Bored on a weekend visit I had left the house, wandered across the street to talk to him as he cut up the wood. It was unusual for him to talk to me about his past. Perhaps it was the time alone together, with none of the older men in the family there to deflect conversation. Earlier in life my grandmother had made sure I was never underfoot: Grandpa’s workplace solitude was sacred. But when my uncles or my father would wander into the shop to chat and joke with him, I’d follow. I’d listen, or I’d look at the rows of electronics repair tools and the Sylvania vacuum tubes ordered by serial number on the shelves.
He held me always at arms length. I was told later that he resented becoming a grandparent, a label my birth bestowed. My mother, his eldest daughter, was 19 when I was born. He was 46, the age I am now. He was never anything but warm to me, but I was never invited to crawl up into his lap.
My jokes? He appreciated my jokes. I started telling them at age three.
— Tell Grandpa your joke, Chris.
— Grandpa, do you know why ducks don’t fly upside down?
— Why, no, Chris! Why don’t ducks fly upside down?
— Because they’d quack up.
He was pleased. My grandmother rolled her eyes. It was proclaimed throughout the family from that day forward that I had inherited my grandfather’s sense of humor. I could always get a little of his time if I had a new joke.
But this reminiscing about his earlier soul searching he’d never done with me before. I knew nothing about my grandfather. His name, for instance. I knew he’d changed his name as a young man, but I only learned what he’d changed it from a week after he died. He had had heart trouble for some years. One morning in 1989 he woke up, put on his white shirt, knotted his tie up snug against his Adam’s apple, walked down the steep stairs — which he’d built himself — into the living room, and died. A week later, after his funeral, my mother told me his birth name after we’d left town and gotten a discreet distance north on Route 96A. He held the details of his life as closely as if they were knotted tight around his collar.
“I went to the Catholic Church, of course, but there were a lot of other churches in Ithaca in the 1930s.” His breath was steam in the cold air. “There were the Episcopalians, and the Methodists, a lot of Protestants.”
He made the last cut to the branch. I brought another from the pile, a mound of oak and walnut and maple limbs the thickness of my shins. I laid the branch across the sawhorses for him. He measured a length against the magic marker line on the saw blade, and made another cut.
“The Spiritualists, now they were interesting. Have you ever been to one of their services?” I nodded. “Oh, that’s right. You guys went down to Lily Dale a few years back. Well, I went to a few of their meetings.”
His saw strokes were measured and fluid, and sawdust poured from each end of the cut in undulating streams. He made the final cut in that branch too, then mopped his forehead. I cut the next few branches as he talked, though my saw strokes were nowhere near as smooth.
“After a while, though, I figured out that all those churches were saying pretty much the same thing, if you looked at it a certain way. Try to be kind, treat people fairly, don’t hurt anyone. I realized that it didn’t really matter what church I went to. I try to live my life the way all those churches agreed I should, and I think that’s good enough.”
I was emerging from my own spiritual search in those days, though my cafeteria menu had run more toward Taoism and Hindu mysticism and hallucinogens than toward variants of Christianity. That year I had arrived, after some struggle, at the same conclusion my grandfather had reached a half century before, though I would have stated it in the negative. None of the doctrines held any solution to pain except ignoring it. None of them offered any cessation of loneliness or grief aside from accepting it as my due.
My grandmother beckoned me back to the house, handed me two glasses of water. I carried them to the woodpile, handed one to my grandfather.
That was the only conversation he and I ever had, for the 29 years we knew each other, that didn’t involve a joke. I started thinking about that conversation this morning. The memory came on me abrupt and vivid. A generation ago that conversation took place, and I still feel the flakes of bark under my fingers. It would not leave me all day, through commute and meetings and lunch and a fast walk up Telegraph Hill. I succumbed to the inevitable. I wrote these words, or most of them, and then halfway through the first draft of the memorial service paragraph that follows it occurred to me that it was in spring I got the phone call in Oakland, dissolved into grief, and bought the plane ticket.
My mother’s family has a private web site for photos and family documents. I found the date of his death there just now, and tears for my grandfather wet my face once more.
Maurice Xavier died on May 16, 1989.
His memorial service was in the Roman Catholic Church in town, the one in which my parents were married, the one I’d walked past twice a day my first two years of school. The priest was new. He hadn’t known my grandfather, though the rest of Seneca County grieved him, it seemed. He had fixed the television of everyone between Waterloo and Trumansburg, it seemed, or climbed up onto their roofs to fix an aerial gone askew over the winter. The priest did as best he could to laud my grandfather. “Maurice was a devout Catholic,” he said, and my mother turned in the pew and shushed my brother and me from our ill-concealed chuckling. She was having trouble stifling her own laugh. At the funeral home I saw him for the first time in two or three years. The suit they’d dressed him in fit better than any I’d seen him wear before, though his tie was a bit looser than he would have liked. I looked hard at his face. I kissed him, the only time I ever did that I can remember. I glanced over my shoulder at the room, full of weeping aunts and uncles, cousins and second cousins. No one was looking.
I cinched his tie up a hair’s breadth from his windpipe, patted it down smooth into his jacket.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
Chris, a very touching and wonderfully worded memoir to your grandfather. Did you really tighten up his tie?
I smiled at that part.
By: By Cowtown Pattie on 2006 05 16
Nice one. Although ... what was his other name? And why did he change it?
How do people named “Xavier” really pronounce their names? Is it “zay-vier” or “ecks-avier”?
My father was a TV repairman and ham radio operator. Two of my earliest “smell” memories are the room-filling stink of a selenium rectifier as it burned out, which was the smell of test-bench disappointment, and the tolerably acrid smell of the soldering iron, which was the smell of purpose and accomplishment.
I still remember the delightfully magical names of the vacuum tubes: 6L6 and 6CG7 and 12AX7.
By: By Hank Fox on 2006 05 17
He almost always had a vest on too. I think someone said he had put on his best vest the morning he died.
I was lucky that I got to spend time with him when I was living there.
He fixed Rod Serling’s TV. :)
By: By craig on 2006 05 17
A wonderful post, Chris.
By: By beth on 2006 05 17
Chris,
You did right by your granddad. Fortunately, you retain a very rich slice of his life.
BB
By: By Bill on 2006 05 17
Although ... what was his other name? And why did he change it?
Excellent questions! and I decline to answer on the grounds that my grandmother might come back from the afterlife and thwap me on the back of a head with a wooden spoon.
How do people named “Xavier� really pronounce their names? Is it “zay-vier� or “ecks-avier�?
The first one.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 05 17
You write the best memorial pieces of anyone I know. Fabulous writing, my friend.
Will you write one for me someday (far far in the future)?
By: By Janeen on 2006 05 17
Yeah, like you’re not gonna way outlive me, Neen.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 05 17
May God grant me a grandson like you, Chris. Someone to giggle at my eulogy and cinch up my tie.
By: By dale on 2006 05 17
My grandfather was never seen without a starched white shirt and a tie either. Though he was 65 when I was born, he insisted I call him John because “grandpa” was for old people. I think he and Maurice would have gotten along quite fine.
By: By patry on 2006 05 17
I’m the one with the sedentary lifestyle, and you’re the one out running everyday. I think chances are good I could croak first.
By: By Janeen on 2006 05 18
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