The writing is simple, with little embellishment, but its simplicity brings with it occasional, devastating clarity—lines that sneak up on you and smack you in the back of the knees. One such passage is on the third page, around 1943:
It was while we were living in the Scott house that I was drafted into the army. We considered the fact that I might not come back from the war. So we shopped for a house so Maxine and Delores would have a home.
I read this section repeatedly, nine or ten times at first, unable to move past it. We considered the fact that I might not come back from the war. What a line to write—no, what a line to live. I wonder if he ever realized what grew out of such an experience—the home they purchased was the homeplace I know: 603 East Wilson Street, Oxford, Indiana. Here is when they put down my roots.
* * *
I can’t prove it, really, but I think my grandparents sort of gave up once they moved to the assisted-living facility. Separated from the community they had lived in for decades, their church, home, and friends, there was a sort of deep and abiding grayness. The move to a nursing home is a symbolic one and my grandpa, especially, didn’t like what it was saying; people kept telling him that at eighty-something he was too old to take care of his house anymore, but I don’t think he ever believed them. The assisted-living facility was called Golden Years, and I always felt like that was some sort of joke.
This was also about the time that they discovered frozen dinners and packaged snacks. Or rather, the time that they decided that it was okay to start using them. When I was a little kid they took great delight in having us over and gathering the family around the table for home-cooked meals, often with ingredients from their garden. But at Golden Years they would just step into the pint-size kitchen and pop in a toaster pastry or a Stouffer’s pot pie. I can’t blame them for it, of course. I’m just observing.
A few years after my grandpa died, I started going to high school a mile down the street from Golden Years. After school I would walk over and eat microwavable pot pies with my grandma, and she would tell me stories. Simple ones. Small ones. Ones about my mom; ones about grandpa; ones about the neighbors. Including obscure details yet skipping over huge sections. Like reading Grandpa’s family history. On the rare occasion that I can get over myself long enough to consider my blessings, I think a lot about those afternoons.
After I went to college, Grandma moved to a more intensive assisted-living facility. I would travel home to see her, and she would be sitting in her chair by the window, watching the hummingbirds feed. (Grandma always had hummingbird feeders around, and they let her put one outside her window at the new place. I think when she looked out there and let her mind wander she could almost believe she was back in Oxford.) I was there when she died, with my mom and dad and a few other family members.
The peculiar thing about people who are dying of old age is that they stop looking like themselves quite a while before the actual event. It’s a different period for everybody—I think my grandpa started about a year before, and my grandma maybe three.
My mom was sitting on the bed when Grandma died. She leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. I heard a faint whisper: “Thank you for loving me.” You could tell that Grandma’s breaths were getting longer and more laborious, and the world felt like it was slowly getting darker.
“Ryan, I think it’s time to go get the nurse.”
I walked down the hallway toward the nurse’s station. The world was definitely dark now; I could hardly see.
“I think she’s gone,” I said when I got there. But this was just a formality—I already knew.
* * *
My wife, Anna, never met my grandma. But she got really close. I postponed our first date to go to the funeral.
* * *
We drove by the homeplace after my grandma died, when we went down to bury her next to my grandpa. It was like going from one graveyard to another. The house was pretty sorry looking; absence filled it like a weight, dragging down the eaves and the corners of its face. My mom would say that you could tell Grandpa hadn’t been there in a while, but as I looked out the back window of the car I thought that I saw him moving slowly through the garden, hunched over and wearing his big brown rubber rain boots. And then I saw Grandma standing on the porch, wiping her hands on her apron and waving us in. And this is the funny thing about places: you could show up there and see a dumpy old house across from an agro plant, but I can’t help but visit my family.
I don’t carry on any traditions. I know little of my heritage. But my family bones fill these holes in the ground in Oxford, Indiana.
JAMES D. GRIFFIOEN
The Fauxtopias of Detroit’s Suburbs
DETROIT ROSE TO ITS GREATEST height (and fell as far as it did) in part because Henry Ford didn’t want to work too hard. As a child, he hated farm tasks that required physical labor; a neighbor once recalled young Henry as the “laziest little bugger on the face of the earth.”1 Ford’s lifelong love of mechanical processes was born out of frustration with manual labor: “I have followed many a weary mile behind a plough and I know all the drudgery of it,” he said. “When very young I suspected that much might somehow be done in a better way.” Science fiction writer Robert A.
