My paternal grandfather was a ruined drunk and chain smoker with hollowed out cheeks and burnt yellow fingers who spent the end of his days, about twenty years, complaining, scowling, and waiting to fall over the brink of death. My mother hated him. I think she would have pushed him had she had the chance. And I suppose she might have after all. For Christmas she always gave him a carton of cigarettes. I don’t remember that he said anything at all intelligible to me my entire life except for once, when he saw me, at eight or nine I suppose, skipping in the driveway. When I came in, he looked at me and said, “You should have been a girl.” It was said without any kindness. It was sharp and mean like the smell that came from him.

At Christmas I dreaded sitting beside him or directly across from him. At least across from him, I was farther away from the funk that oozed out of him. But he had gotten the use out of his teeth by the time I was a boy and he had to have his food pureed. Between cigarettes and at dinner too he would pop olives and make a grand dribbling production out of gumming them. And so I loathed olives for most of my life.

Yes I suppose I should respect my elders. And now, and then, I could respect my mother’s parents and my dad’s mom too. Mostly I respected my paternal grandmother for taking care of this half man. But he frightened me. He frightened me terribly. He was all scowl and sallow-skinned. And he looked to have a barely tamed beast of rage behind his piercing eyes. Which probably isn’t far from the truth. I have heard many stories about his legendary malfeasance. He had the look in his eye of someone who could kill a man or just as likely already had. One thing I have to say for my father: he doesn’t drink. And rather than betray any sign of anger, he made himself, I suppose to spite his father, not gentle. No, gentle isn’t right. Wooden. Unfathomable. My father tells unfunny jokes and laughs raucously. It’s funny, it’s never really occurred to me until now that I have that in common with my father: that I have remade myself in spite of mine, my father, that is.

And so my grandfather remained exactly the same until I was 20.

In my freshman year I was invited to the home of the University President. With 15 other scholarship winners. I most seriously underdressed. And because I was underdressed and because I was lost and adrift in an identity that hadn’t quite found its footing there was a camera crew. At dinner I sat just around the corner from the president. And there were olives. Not the tiny green pimento olives with the little red eyes that my grandfather used to worry. Big black olives. And because I was supping with the president I thought I should better have one. I popped it in my mouth. It was only a little smaller than a golf ball. I bit into it. The blackness popped and filled my mouth with a salty acrid pickling juice. And my ambitious reckless teeth were of a sudden stopped by a very dense pit. I didn’t know that olives had pits. My teeth were stunned and I’m sure the stunning spread to my face. I’m talking to the president about who I think I need to be. Or the state of education. Or something god awful and I’ve suddenly introduced a pit into my mouth. I was also still worried about the extra number of forks. And I was the only boy not wearing a tie. I tried to slip the pit under my tongue. It didn’t work. I tried to move the pit to the side of mouth. Less successful. So when, naturally, the president looked the other way, I swallowed that awful olive pit. I sometimes imagine that that dense dark pit is still digesting.

I was writing an essay on Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter when I found out my grandfather had died. I didn’t go. I didn’t go because I didn’t love or respect or know him. And I didn’t go because I had to finish my English essay. And I didn’t go because my father would have made the same face and the same jokes whether I had been there or not. Much like, forgive me, much like the man in the coffin, who, alive or dead, had only had one face.

Still, of course, I should have gone. I got 88 on the essay.

And as it turns out, once in a while, once in a long while, I crave olives.

SS