Existentialism with my Grandaddy

Back in the 1980s, Granddaddy chose one day a year for our field trips. I’d not go to school that day. Instead, I'd wait with my face to the window, watching the gravel road leading to our driveway. Waiting so we could spend the day together. Just us.

First, breakfast at Shoney’s. Appropriately sated on eggs and biscuits and fried potatoes and coffee—he’d let me have my own cup, which I pretended to like—we’d visit the West Virginia Capitol building, watching legislative floor sessions and committee hearings before dropping in on some of his old colleagues who were still in office; he’d been a member of the House of Delegates in the late 1960s. Even though he was a pastor by then, he still considered politics something of a hobby. Driving around in his brown Chevrolet Caprice that smelled of wintergreen candies he carried in his pocket and Old Spice aftershave he wore on his cheeks, he’d have me recite the presidents, in order. I’d tell him who represented West Virginia in Congress, and who our elected statehouse representatives were.

After lunch, we’d spend the afternoon touring various graveyards around Putnam County. Showen's Hill was hidden by kudzu, graves covered with pine needles. Antioch, out Red House, lay next to a listing church of faded gray wood, its steeple still standing despite the congregation having died off before I was born. Grandaddy carried a notebook, and once we found some faded tombstone under which lay the body of an ancestor long gone, he’d write their name on the white and blue-lined pages, connecting it with others to form a family tree. Grandaddy had great penmanship. I can close my eyes even now and see the looping characters, slightly slanted, in steady cursive. Always cursive.

He was a big thinker, an introvert who prepared for his sermons by taking long afternoon walks in the 15-acre woods he owned off Scary Creek. Once he found a spot secluded enough, he’d pray, then open his Bible and preach that Sunday’s sermon to a congregation of trees and squirrels. That’s not to say he wasn’t gregarious; he could be, in the right social context. But many times he was quiet and still, and in those moments you’d see the gears turning in his prodigious mind. I felt special when he shared whatever thought he was working through, as if letting me in on a secret. Those moments often came on our field trips, trying out his ideas on the welcome audience of a teenage boy sitting rapt in the passenger seat of a Chevy.

I don’t think Grandaddy believed in fate or destiny, but rather that our choices led us inexorably toward a future molded by our free will, however fallible. On our trips, he’d often tell the story of a job offer he received, before he married my Granny, that would have required a move to Houston. He’d follow that “what if?” thread to illustrate the transitive nature of existence. Houston meant he would not have met Granny. That's where his stream of consciousness would start, and where he'd stop it. He’d leave me to follow the thread to its logical conclusion. One choice—his decision to decline the job offer—cleared the path to endless moments stretched over time. It led to field trips between a grandfather and his grandson.

To this very moment, as I type out these words.

To those faded pieces of notebook paper I still own, which now bear my handwriting as well, adding names on a still-incomplete family tree.