AN ELEGY FOR GERALD DEAN HUDSON

Grandpa died yesterday.

In my memories of my grandfather, Vin Scully plays prominently. I am not 37 and my grandfather is not in his eighties. On the carport outside the house, Grandpa is waging war on oil spots—unwanted presents dropped by his children’s cars, his granddaughter’s friends’ cars. He pours what looks like kitty litter in little mounds and mumbles…grrr.   The carport is in front of the big box of a house on Gunn Avenue. Grandpa is half hidden by a car or a truck. I know his full blue-jeaned and t-shirted body is there somewhere under a vehicle. He’s on a makeshift roller under an engine, tinkering. It’s the seventies, it’s the eighties, it’s the nineties. No matter---he’s there and Vin Scully is announcing and commentating on the Dodger game on the same transistor radio. Which game? All games. Most of the time the Dodgers are losing. Dagnabbit. It doesn’t matter. It is the endless loop of my childhood. The constant.

Vin Scully is now narrating his death for me in my head. “Now Hudson, number 16 originally hailed from Montebello. He’s a local boy and boy did he have staying power. You know they say he had heart problems way back in the seventies but look at how long that ticker lasted after that—I’d say that was 30 years! Not bad.”

Sometimes he’s in his workshop in the back. I never go passed the first foot beyond the door. It smells like the dust of civilizations and rusty nails, a place for desert tortoises to hibernate. There are cobwebs and someone once told me there were rats. He’s there often. Rocks are tumbling one year, wood is working the next. A hum of saws and drills then––OW! and a stream #$%^%&*^&Y()IJ#@Q#””??!@#&&**)&^^R$%@.

Grandpa is the history of Southeastern Los Angeles. The hillbilly stock stays East of the river. A little bit of college. A little bit of soldier. A little bit of GI Bill. A lot of staying put. Staking out that claim of American dream made of Okie Ozark stock. He used to smell like Planter’s peanuts and beer. He drank buttermilk out of the carton. Sometimes life got confusing. Daughters and granddaughters and wife gaggling loudly. He’s dressed and ready two hours early for any occasion. Sit and wait. Sit and wait. He played music by ear. Piano medleys of forties tunes while you wait. Banjo picking sweet, unteachable notes.

He always flew the flag. He kept a picture of me taken in 1st grade. I am standing with lopsided pigtails in a patchwork dress with the bicentennial flag flying in the background. This is how I feel when I want to feel American. Grandpa hates to pay taxes, votes libertarian and utilizes the public library more than anyone I will ever know. He was always in love with his wife; you could see it in his eyes.

Aside from my father and I, Gerald Dean Hudson drove slower than anyone I’ve ever met with the calm evenness of a Buddhist monk in meditation.

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Grandpa meets me at the Springfield Airport in southern Missouri. We are together for two weeks stay with his Aunt Mary’s, his favorite and one of the few living relatives left from back in his day. She lives on a rural route road adjacent to an LDS church and immediately launches into a speech regarding how she’s a Baptist through and through and she’ll be damned if she sells her meadow to the Mormons so that they can build a bigger parking lot, thank you very much. Later when she’s sleeping he says I always thought you should meet her. Perhaps that’s where you get it. I don’t ask what ‘it’ is but I think I know and I smile and make us tuna fish sandwiches with walnuts and apples for when Mary wakes up. He’s right. Mary fills in all the blanks; crosses the Ts and dots the Is on family mysteries.

Grandpa takes me for drives and points out empty land and tells of swimming holes, and mud, and crawfish, and tall grass and having a heap of cousins. He talks of his father and then of his mother, and where they went wrong, where they went right, and I begin to realize that he knows more than he lets on.  He says he’s sorry he can’t always say what’s on his mind. That stop gap in his DNA--which I know from my own father.

I am in my twenties and the oldest grandchild. We have to stop our talk and our walk. The angina is reminding him he is in his seventies. We are in the cemetery when it hits, looking out at graves of our ancestors strewn with cheap, faded plastic flowers. Names engraved with awkward spellings.  He leans on me back to the rental car, but he does the driving. Slow and silent the first mile but as the attack passes, he begins again with the same tour guide verve of before.

A year later, Grandpa reads a chunk of a draft of my novel. The part set in the Ozarks. The part that tries to comprehend what it is to be of stubborn hillbilly stock in a constant flux of southern California reinvention. He walks right up to me when I arrive on Gunn Avenue for a brief visit and gives me a hug. “I don’t know how you did it, “ he says, “but you got it. It sounded like my dad was talking and Uncle Cricket too. You got it down.” I got it, I tell him, from him. Thanks.

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He loved my kids. There is some discrepancy of whether or not Grandpa was a baby person, but I will err on the side of yes. I remember him strolling me around. I saw how his eyes watered and twinkled at my son and daughter spinning around him. He seemed to like that I’d gotten here---to motherhood.

These are the things I will remember well. The forward movement and the limitations. The things love is made from. Safe travels, Grandpa, to the next plane.