My maternal grandfather once threatened to beat me up.
Why?
Because he had heard about kids coming back from Israel with earrings and he didn’t think I should have one. Very few of you readers knew Mr. Silver and how unusual his words to me were.
Grandpa Wilner once offered to join me in a potential fight just before my middle sister’s wedding, but Grandpa Silver, that was never going to be his thing.
I don’t remember taking his threat particularly seriously but I do remember that earrings weren’t something you saw men often wearing in 1985. In those days there was a conversation about how it could be a sign that you were gay, depending on what ear you had it in.
Anyhoo, I watched the Netflix documentary on the making of We Are The World and that is what brought be back to 1985.
Lionel Ritchie tells a story about how his father told him you can’t always go home and to enjoy the time while you have got it.
The point was the house may still stand but the people you want to be there won’t always be and that resonates with me.
This coming August will mark 13 years since Grandpa died and though I have a thousand stories I can tell there are 10,000 questions to go with those.
Some are meaningful and some aren’t particularly important, just my own curiosity.
I spent quite a bit of time with him after my grandmother died and he spoke with me about many things. He had a habit of grabbing your arm and holding onto it when he looked you in the eye.
Sometimes I would grab his arm before he got mine and tell him I had ideas for how to make us rich. That included my desire to train him to become the fastest 95 year-old man or something similar.
He would laugh and say he had no interest in the actual exercise and I’d say “Grandma would have pushed you to exercise more” or something like that.
Sometimes he’d laugh some more and tell me that bringing her up wasn’t fair. I remember telling him how I saw how he reacted sometimes if she got angry with him.
It didn’t happen often, but occasionally she would say she was “disgusted with him” and his expression would change.
They met when they were 11, were married for about 76 years so they had a long run.
Anyhoo, during one of the get rich schemes I told him we could market him as “Not just another Silverman.”
We went back and forth about whether it was better to use Silverman or space it in some ways like “Silver…MAN!”
****
I got back from Israel in August of ’85 and a few weeks later my grandparents took the whole family to Hawaii to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.
Somewhere in Maui Grandpa and I sat down and talked about my time in Israel and discussed his memories of the rebirth of the state in ’48.
I remember touching upon Pearl Harbor, WWII and the Holocaust as well as the family but I don’t remember all of the details.
It is just fragments of memory that I keep trying to get at but it is almost 40 years ago now and those pieces are elusive.
Certain things weren’t as important to me to hold onto back then and in some ways I was distracted by what I had experienced that summer and what was going on around me.
The time in Hawaii was exceptional and I loved it but I also knew I was going to fly back before the family did because I had to register for my junior year of high school.
The house was going to be mine for a week and I had ideas.
It is fair to say I am at times nostalgic and sentimental but also fair to say I can be very hard about some choices.
That We Are The World documentary has my head spinning in multiple directions. Not in a bad way, there isn’t regret, remorse or longing to go back though it would be fun.
Mostly it has me thinking a bit about some of the choices I made since then and the long strange path that brought me to this place.
It reminds me of walking through the Old City of Jerusalem, visiting Gaza and going all over the place during a very different time.
It reminds me of multiple trips in which I drove across country or even just times from Los Angeles To Texas and how sometimes I would just follow the road to wherever it lead.
“Here we go, wherever that is” still holds for me.
The right mood catches me and I am happy to go on a walkabout and see what lies over the bend and around the curve.
I have seen my kids do it a bunch of times and it always makes me smile. I recognize that curiosity.
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I applaud your great luck; I never had the opportunity to talk “much” with either of my grandfathers. One was too old, and the other… well, let’s just say he was kind of the pariah of the family. I learned my lessons from my parents, though most of it was through what I saw and heard, not what they taught me after the age of 4 or 5 years old. Still, it feels… nice… to think about the memories, though I wish both of them were still around.
I do feel quite lucky to have had my grandparents around for as long as I did. Very few of my friends had that.
I was 37 when my first grandfather died and 42 when the second one did so I knew them as a kid and adult.
Learning from your parents is still a good thing, if you have good parents. They can teach us quite a bit without having to say much. Just watching them go about their business.