Memoir
Croquet, Neckties, Lessons Learned and Unlearned
Thoughts and memories on aging
My grandfather was a top-notch croquet player. He won a few competitions in his youth, or so the legend goes. That was long before my time with him. Even so, he taught me, as he did all of his children and grandchildren the sport. He was wicked between the wickets and he gave no quarter even though he was teaching. The sport might have been the medium, but the lessons were about life.
He was so fond of the sport that he had carved a croquet field out of a piece of his property and kept it in immaculate condition. He was fiercely proud of that field. My cousins and I would get yelled at if we malingered too long without playing, or horsed around using our mallets as pretend swords to swat at each other. I once watched him take a belt to some cousin’s new puppy that decided to dig up and run around with the scoring post in its mouth. This was a sacred place to PaPa, not to be defiled by man or beast.
He was the patriarch of a reasonably, though not overly large clan. His five kids, all of whom would become teachers, spawned twelve grandkids in three distinct generations, each generation separated from the next by five or more years. I was in the younger end of the middle generation. Outside of holidays, there were always three big family reunions, Spring, Summer, and Fall. The Spring and Fall reunions were to celebrate each of the grandparents' birthdays, and the Summer event was just because it was Summer. There were always croquet matches at these events, and regardless of which generation you belonged to, you played against all comers. Competition was the name of the game of growing up.
Beside the croquet court were chairs, blankets, and a picnic table with a red-checkered tablecloth, filled with pitchers of tea and lemonade, fried chicken, ham biscuits, deviled eggs, potato salad, and pie. There was always pie.
These family reunions were important enough occasions to draw drop-ins from neighbors and friends of my grandparents. Whether they were friends from church or customers of their general store, they were all offered a plate and a glass of lemonade or tea. Close family friends would occasionally be allowed to play croquet with the family, though I always got the feeling that was some kind of honor, not easily bestowed.
These gatherings were also the occasions when the older grandkids would bring their boy or girlfriend to meet the family. Always a big deal and fraught with peril, it could become an even more significant event. If the date was allowed to play a game it was an even greater honor than that bestowed on family friends. You knew then and there that the chances of a wedding were pretty good.
As I recall now, it all feels much like a scene from the musical Oklahoma or any other Hollywood flick about life in a small town. I actually used memories of those events as an inspiration in a staging of the play Inherit the Wind years later.
If it doesn’t sound like enough of a cliché, my grandfather always wore a suit and a straw boater. In fact, I have no memory of my grandfather without him wearing a suit and a necktie or at least a vest until he got sick and began his long-suffering path toward the end of his journey.
That side of my family, my mother’s, was famous for long fadeouts. Whether it was cancer or just the effects of old age, death always seemed to linger too long as an unwelcome family guest, resetting everyone’s agendas as it became a part of life. My mother, the youngest of the bunch, took on the burdens of nursing each of her four siblings and both parents until their passings, affecting our immediate family in profound ways that my sisters and I wouldn’t fully understand until she herself lingered long and hard before succumbing to a bout with cancer.
The short, sharp shock that accompanies a sudden surprising death yields one kind of grieving. I experienced that when my Dad died much too young from a heart attack. A long, lingering passing yields something else altogether. You grieve as you breathe along the way as you watch your loved one slowly become more debilitated and disintegrate before your eyes. I’m not sure who suffers more.
Papa was old as I first recall him as a part of my life. To me, he was, and had always been old. My immediate family spent most Saturday afternoons at his house and had dinner there. He had suffered a couple of strokes along the way, but always seemed to recover well enough to continue to teach and play croquet, attend church league softball games, and run the store. Ever since I had known him he was losing his hearing and wore hearing aids in both ears.
Whenever the Boston Red Sox were playing on the Saturday afternoon game of the week, I was given the task of telling him what the announcers were saying. Even with his hearing aids, he couldn’t understand what was being said on the TV over the din from the kitchen in the next room. He had fought in World War I with one of the Red Sox coaches so they were his favorite team, but he hated the announcers. I learned a lot about baseball and swearing on those Saturday afternoons, even though it felt like a chore.
Soon after I got my driver's license he had to give his up, so driving my grandparents was added to my list of chores. I would drive his car that always smelled of the cigars he was always smoking and there was always one half-smoked in the ashtray waiting to be taken up again. At some point, I guess I got old enough and picked up too many interests of my own to be bothered with translating what Joe Garagiola was saying to him on Saturday afternoons or driving him around.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can remember when he stopped working the store and stopped attending church league softball games. Before he stopped attending, he would always scold my cousin or I if we didn’t play to his satisfaction, always teaching, always stern. I can also remember when the croquet matches stopped and the field went unattended. None of those changes registered then. I was still too young to comprehend the meaning of what were obvious signs and was shocked when, while away at college, my mother called and told me my grandparents were moving in with us because PaPa was dying.
I went home that weekend to help out. Even though he had obviously slowed a bit while I was growing up, he had always looked like the same old man he always was to me. Even when I pictured him fighting in the First World War with his buddy, the Red Sox coach, he was always that old man. Somehow I never thought that was strange.
He died at 89. He was 70 when I was born. I’ve just turned 68. Before I left for college he looked and acted like the same old PaPa I’d always known. Not that day. He was suddenly frail and incapable as my father helped him down the long hall to the bed he would lie, and eventually die in, four months later. He was still wearing a necktie, though that would be the last time I saw him wear one.
It was shocking to see the change. It was the first time the concept of aging as a cause of death, or just as a concept in and of itself, took on any significance for me. I had known what death was about. My paternal grandfather died of prostate cancer when I was seven and I had never known he was sick until right before the end. An uncle via marriage had died far too young of a heart attack when I was ten or eleven. I had known friends who had lost family to illness, car wrecks, farm accidents, even mudslides, and severe flooding that ripped our county apart in the wake of Hurricane Camille after it was no longer a hurricane.
But, for some reason, this was the first time that the thought of dying from the frailties of old age became a real thing. Slowing down I understood. Stopping I did not. Eventually, you just didn’t play croquet anymore. Or you needed a grandson to drive you around. But that was just a different life pattern. And life goes on.
I don’t mean to make this political, but it seems every breath we take has political ramifications these days. Hopefully, enough time has passed since Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance to make it less so. All of these memories flashed back to me in excruciating detail when I watched Joe Biden walk out onto that stage a few weeks ago. All of sudden an old, yet seemingly very capable man, was old, yet seemingly incapable. I had the exact same visceral and emotional reaction I did when I helped my father help my grandfather into our house on that day he came to live out his days with us.
Aging may be ageless, but age is a moving target as the ages pass. Time may take a toll, but time also yields advances that allow us to live longer and look and live younger as we do. I’m only two years younger than my grandfather was when I was born. The gap feels greater than two years in the picture below with him holding me and my cousin in his lap compared to the adjacent image from earlier this year of me with my grandchildren.
Certainly, at some point, that gap will close. It does for all of us unless something sudden or tragic intervenes.
When my mother, the last surviving of my grandfather’s children, was diagnosed with cancer for the second time, the doctors gave her a couple of months. She hung on for eleven even though she had refused treatment. After her diagnosis she gave me and my sisters the most important and loving gift she ever bestowed on us. She demanded that we move her out of her house and into a facility to await her death. Her loving reasoning was that she did not want her children to live through what she had lived through while nursing her siblings and parents to their ends.
She knew firsthand the toll that requires and told us so. We had all seen that toll take pieces of her along the way, but hearing it took on a different, deeper meaning. Mom was a teacher and she was teaching. Tough lessons she had lived and learned. Lessons she wanted to ingrain in us.
I heard PaPa in the tone of her voice, teaching in the same tough way he would with a croquet mallet in his hand or after a tough loss on the ball field. There was no brooking the lesson. You took it and hopefully got better from it. It was hard to take then and became harder still when she hung on as long as she did. It’s hard to take now.
When the lights begin to fade there’s a clarity to the light remaining in the shadows if you have the courage not to avert your eyes.
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