4:30a.m.

Woke up late tonight. I actually stopped sleeping around 1a.m. but just turned on a light and stayed in bed for another hour, thinking, staring at the ceiling.

Green tea is ready, the Ramones are playing. I remember that my grandfather was a withdrawn sort of man, very quiet and solitary. He had a large workshop in the back yard where he spent a lot of his time, just listening to music and welding things together. He would drink and weld anything, it didn't matter what the result was. On weekends he would take some of the grandkids to a local auction, where 50 or so people would show up trying to sell piles and piles of scrap metal. Everyone would make bids on whatever bits of metal they were looking for, and my grandfather loved to buy random stuff, just anything that looked interesting or struck a chord with him. He would make homemade bicycles, wheelbarrows, junk sculptures. In fact, my parents never bought a bicycle for me, the three that I had as a kid all came from his shop, sort of gangly, mismatched hybrids he had put together for me.

My grandfather also had an enormous garden, which he and my grandmother had tried to live off of for most of their lives. They had always been poor and so lived on a diet consisting largely of tomatos and turnip greens. Grandfather was a janitor, grandmother served food at a high school cafeteria. Grandfather approached the garden in the same way that he approached welding: always looking for new ways of doing it, constantly experimenting with different techniques. The problem is that he never actually studied the subject, he would just roam around his workshop, inventing his own brand of gardening. I remember one time, when I was about 7 or so, I opened the shop's enormous front door and saw my grandfather standing over his cast-iron stove. It was filled with burning logs, and on top of it sat a big cooking pot that he was stirring with a wooden spoon. He was concentrating intensely and didn't even say hi when I walked in, he just stirred the spoon, slowly and methodically.

"What are you cooking?", I asked.

"Dirt", he said. "I'm cooking dirt."

I was confused and asked the obvious question: "Why?"

"Go play with the chickens", he muttered, and the discussion was over.

The chickens, that was another thing. He loved buying the meanest roosters he could find. He would go to a nearby livestock auction and buy a rooster based entirely upon whether or not it attacked him. For the grandkids, it was one of our favorite games growing up, taunting the rooster and then running away as it chased us. The way to taunt a rooster is to turn your back to it....they love to hop up and claw the backs of your legs.

Roosters were, for my grandfather, what sports are to most other people, they were his main source of entertainment. When one of us would react too slowly and end up with a maniacal rooster attatched to our legs....us running and screaming, the rooster clawing and cackling...he would just laugh and yell, "Get em'!!" It didn't occurr to me until later that our rooster game might have been the only reason he picked the mean ones, he really got a kick out of it.

Anyway, he died of a heart attack in 1987, when I was 12. He was fishing with my uncle and just fell over, he passed instantly and without warning.

I was thinking about this tonight, remembering things more than usual. Not sure why that is.
Memories can be pushy that way.

thanks...