116. Grandpa

I have always felt I had the best father in the world. I know, of course, that many people are lucky enough to feel the same way about their own fathers. But no one has ever said that about my grandfather.

My grandfather, the only grandparent I’ve ever known, had a bit of a reputation for being odd. He and my grandmother were both Simeone — first cousins — in a arrangement that was the custom of the time, and unfortunately resulted in my father having an inherited form of blindness.

He had come to America as a young man, leaving his wife and two sons back in Gaeta, where he saw them only every few years. When it was time to return to America, he was famous for his sobbing farewells, which were followed immediately by pulling out his nice sandwich and wine as soon as the train pulled out of the station.

In America, he lived in Waltham, Mass., where a branch of the family had settled. He was a whiz with numbers, but his eccentricities prevented him from ever having work that took advantage of his abilities. In fact, whenever I did something my parents considered “weird,” they would call me Grandpa, as if his DNA was manifesting itself in me. When my father came to America at age 19, there was apparently no talk of living with his father; he lived with his Uncle Nick and his family instead.

That said, when I was little, in the final years of his life, my parents took him in. I guess that’s what one did in those days; they certainly couldn’t have been thrilled to do it. We had a tiny two-bedroom ranch house, so the dining room was turned into a bedroom for Grandpa, and we ate our meals in a corner of the living room. I remember only a few things about him — he smoked little cigars, he drank vermouth, and he cooked pigs’ feet on the stove, which I remember liking, probably the only American-born preschooler in the world who could say that. My very proper and fastidious mother made my father speak to him about peeing in the back yard. The only thing I can remember him saying to me was that he was going to Waltham to see relatives, but would be back “by and by.”

When I was four, I remember sitting down to lunch. My grandfather had an unusual look on his face; I clearly remember thinking he looked like an angel. At that moment, he crumbled to the floor and died. I don’t remember being particularly traumatized by this event, but for the next 30 years, whenever my father dozed off in front of the TV, I would check to make sure he was breathing.

On January 8, 1988, he wasn’t.