ode to pop-pop

Lately I've been pretty emotional about things. I don't know what it is. I'm certainly not unhappy. My 2007 Action Plan is working out marvelously, and my horoscope keeps telling me that great things are going to happen soon in my career and love life. But things like a discussion about walking a ten-minute mile will make me irrationally pissed off* and reading this this 93-year-old man's blog post about his grandfather makes my heart totally break in a thousand pieces. Perhaps it's because it's the middle of the month, or perhaps all this exercise and organic food is making me a bitch/crybaby. I'm not sure.

*Special note to she on the other side of that discussion: I Googled it the next day. Irrational, I know. But seriously, you should start training for the Olympics because there is actually an event called racewalking and they walk 6-minute miles. Also, I love you.

Anyway, that blog made me start thinking about my own grandfather, Pop-Pop. And how he would sit in their old boxy Cadillac in the Marshalls parking lot while my grandmother, Mom-Mom, would spend five hours inside, carefully selecting ankle-length prairie skirts that she would ultimately never wear and sandals that she would complain irritated her hammer toes* until she retired them three years later. Sometimes he would sleep, sometimes he would read the paper, sometimes he would just listen to Frank Sinatra and probably reminisce about when my Mom-Mom was a hot young blonde with Angelina Jolie lips and Hollywood dreams, before the kids and the mortgage and the alcoholism.

*Not even sure what hammer toes are and not sure I want to know.

I'm sure those five hours were always incredibly boring. I'm sure he would much rather have been fishing, or watching the 9-inch black-and-white television in their kitchen, or playing with his grandkids. But he never complained. Not even once. And she shopped a lot. He did it to keep her happy, even if it meant sacrificing his own happiness, because she was his wife and he was her husband.

I think he spent their entire marriage keeping her happy at the expense of his own happiness. And I don't know if I could really say he was a better man for doing it. I really would rather him have been happy himself. But maybe he was. Maybe just seeing her happy made his world.

I'm sure that Mom-Mom would have never have made him sit the car again if it meant that he didn't have to leave her on May 6, 1994. In her last few years, everybody could see that she really missed him and didn't really know what to do with herself without him. When she left us ten years after Pop-Pop, I knew she was ready to find her husband, who was probably somewhere in the afterlife, sitting in a boxy Cadillac listening to Frank Sinatra, quietly waiting for her to finish what she was doing so he could take her home.