Somewhere Gone

“You still think about her though?”

“Yeah. You know man, I do. It comes and it goes. Mostly music brings it back.”

“Like the radio?”

“Who listens to the radio anymore?”

“I do man, I’m living at home right now.”

“Oh for real, 92.3, Hot 106 and all the stations?”

“Never stopped.”

“Well how’s that going, home and all that?”

“It’s alright. My new job starts in March and we’ll see. I feel good about it though.”

“I feel that. Hey, look, I got to go but let’s talk later this week.”

“Alright. Good to talk to you dude.”

“You too. Talk soon and, haha, stay out of trouble my man.”

“I will. Goodbye.

It was good to talk to someone back home. I haven’t been back in awhile. No one ever tells you that getting your degree is like graduating from seeing your best friends. Or, people do tell you but you don’t understand because you’ve lived your whole life with your friends in the same town or on the same campus. It is hard to understand what you have never experienced.

COVID-19 drove this point home for me: relationships matter. Whether it is a text, a meme, or a phone call, the content is so much less important than the connection. I was never good with my phone. I like to be with people, which was why the pandemic was really hard for me, but I am on my phone a lot more now than I ever was before. Especially after I got the news about Gramp.

I knew that he hadn’t been doing too well. Last time I saw him he called me Jimmy and my cousin Jimmy and him never got along. Not to mention that Jimmy is at least a foot shorter than me and twice as wide. Anyway, and now I was really reminiscing, but so my mom had left the room in the nursing home to find the nurse and I was looking out the window at a brown patch of grass in the lawn. That made me tear up and I looked back at my grandpa. He still hadn’t responded to my question.

He wheezed once and then for a little bit longer. I couldn't make out any full words.

I said, “It’s alright Gramp. I just like to be here with you. We don’t need to talk.”

The tears were really pricking at my eyes then, so I reached out my hand and he grabbed it. Used to be a bear of a man and now he was as slender as a canoe, but he hadn’t lost his grip. This was the guy who told me once that, “two minutes is a long time if you are hanging from your thumbs.” I guess it was. Anyway, he squeezed my hand and my mom came back and when I left he gave me a little salute. His arm was perfectly perpendicular to his body just like when he was teaching me how to do my pull-ups on the monkey bars as a child.

The alarm on my phone brought me back to my apartment. I grabbed my keys and got out of the apartment, locked the door and headed for the elevator. I walked in and there was a Pit Bull in the corner.

“Hey boy” I said and gave him my hand to sniff. “Dogs always want to know what’s up with you immediately” I said to the woman holding him by a leash.

“What floor do you need?” She asked me.

“Oh, sorry” I said, “hit five for me.”

We rode the rest of the way in silence, except for the panting of her dog and the clacking of his claws on the elevator floor. I got off and took my wet clothes and threw them into the dryer. I had forgotten the dryer sheet. Headed back to the elevator, I figured I better check the mail.

Mail was getting me through this pandemic. A picture might be worth a thousand words but a letter is worth at least a million emails. There was a small package for me and it was from halfway across the country. Dread coiled around my throat and wound it's way down to my heart. Sometimes you just know that it is bad. I opened the package right there and, yup, his small black notebook slipped out of the tear in the package.

I opened it and a check fluttered to the floor. My eyes were on the inscription, written in my grandpa’s Elvish script.

Finn,

Do something with your life.

I love you.

Gramp

I dropped the notebook, his from the war, and tears began to moisten the top of my mask. I just stood there and cried. My phone hadn’t even pinged yet, but then it did and I did not need to read the text to see the horrible news in the family group chat. Sometimes your heart just knows and I knew the instant I saw the knife marks in that old black leather with his initials in the top left corner. He was gone from this world. My phone pinged then and what my heart knew was confirmed by my eyes.

I stooped down to the floor and picked up the check: $20,000. I couldn’t believe that but that disbelief was so much smaller than my loss that it just did not register at all. The next hour was like that, with everything far away from the sorrow swirling around inside of me. I was out by then, at a bar, and I said, “I don’t care what you have to do but I want to hear In Color by Jamey Johnson.” The bartender took one look at me and disappeared. As I poured over the picture of Gramp in his Air Force uniform, the song came on.

I closed the book, sat back, and let the music muster up the gravelly baritone of the man who had taught me to “just listen.”

I said, “Grandpa what’s this picture here?

It’s all black and white, and it ain’t real clear

Is that you there?” He said yeah…