Without even really thinking about it, I somehow cued up Johnny Cash’s “We’ll Meet Again” for the first time in months, but more notably, for the first time since my grandfather died in August. I was sitting here reading a thread, not even really paying attention to the song, and all of the sudden my whole body started to tingle. For a second I was wondering what the hell was going on but fairly quickly I just though “Oh…” and started to cry.
I don’t know why I’ve always associated my grandfather with Johnny Cash. He said he liked him, but I never actually heard him to listen to him, and in fact, the only Johnny Cash story I ever heard about my grandfather was a negative one. Apparently when my dad was a kid, my grandfather walked in on him listening to “A Boy Named Sue” (I’m guessing this was when you could still get the record without “son of a bitch” censored) and spanked him.
I guess I just always thought of them as having similar qualities: wise, rugged, incredibly tough, endearing, easy to like, easy to love. On top of all that, grandpa was one of the funniest, most positive, most skilled and talented men that ever lived. We never talked for less than an hour when I’d call him, and my stomach always hurt the next morning from laughing so hard, and he is the one person that I can honestly say I never heard say anything bad about anyone. He was incredibly handy with his hands, able to fix anything mechanical, able to whittle any kind of little toy our whistle or shape or knick-knack while sitting around talking to several different people and making it look completely effortless. Another one of his favorite hobbies was fixing clocks that professional clocksmiths couldn’t fix, or wouldn’t touch.
He never swore, he never drank, and he quit smoking cold turkey when he was 27, and though he wouldn’t have these things in his house, he was fully unjudgemental of people who did them. He didn’t abstain from these things to assume some “holier than thou” position, and in fact I don’t know why he abstained from them, because it was simply never an issue.
“The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer” is another Cash song I have trouble listening to without tearing up. When he says “this is the first time I’ve seen the sun come up that I can’t come up with it” it nearly kills me. My grandfather was just that kind of guy. He beat me in a foot race, uphill, 3 months before he died (which would’ve been, oh, 9 months after the detection of his cancer.) I’m in pretty good shape, definitely no slow-poke, and believe me I was trying. We had walked down his long, steep hill to his pond and I remember thinking “is he still going to be able to make it?” This is a tough walk up and down for healthy people in their teens and twenties. On the way back up he suddenly burst off running up the hill and I gave it everything I had to keep up with him and just couldn’t do it. He was tired the rest of the day (his only complaint throughout his sickness was that he lost “his energy” too easily), but he knew by how out of breath I was that I didn’t have the win, and both of us were glad of that. At that moment I thought the guy had years left in him.
It’s times like this that I really wish I believed in god because I really really want to see my grandpa again.
I miss you grandpa :(.