I had a sweet tooth for discovering something new. I was like a child in a grocery store wanting to stop at every candy bar they see. When I questioned something I observed I had to stop and discover the answer. It followed me everywhere, but the only ones who seemed to share my curiosity were not those my age. When I wasn’t at my grandparent’s home, I explored my own yard, front and back. However there were more times than not that my mother was not amused when I extracted algae from our pool or tinged my Oshkosh overalls with violet juice from a blackberry bush. I dug up flowerbeds after sneaking a gardening shovel from the garage, and gave both my parents near heart failure after I tumbled into the creek behind our house. My girl friends didn’t share my fascination with catching grasshoppers between warm palms or hunting for fossils in the dirt behind the slide on the playground. Yet I found solace in discovering the things I did on my own. I knew I was developing little by little but there were always times I wished a pair of sticky fingers accompanied mine after fingering the sap on a tree or a little help to turn over a sizeable rock. I wanted someone else’s eyes to widen as big as mine follow a discovery. Still, it was these twinges of solitude and a bit of loneliness that give the countless memories with my grandfather the value they have today.
Because of him, my childhood was a hands-on experience. Samples of rose, purple and clear quartz reflected the late afternoon sun around the same time I took my naps and took comfort in the prisms of light flitting under my eyes to lull me into a light sleep. My days were spent exploring and re-exploring the house, which was like a miniature museum where no curator told me “hands off.” Those rocks were enigmas in and of themselves, each with their own story that I would plead my grandfather to tell and retell. Some afternoons I situated myself on the hardwood floor in my grandfather’s study, thumbing through my favorite book of his, the one with the worn binding and pages that threatened to detach with every flick of my wrist. The photographs of rocks and natural phenomenon depicted colors only found in nature and shapes no illustrator could copy. My grandfather would sag slowly, like the limbs of the maple outside that held my tire swing, as he joined me on the floor. Licking his thumb and forefinger to turn the pages that stuck with age, his fingers would graze the photos as if trying to give them dimension. His skin, russet and age-spotted against the paper, resembled the photo of sandstone he so often returned to. And then we’d lose track of time until he noticed the light streaming through the window had changed positions from hours before. He’d look up then, the lights rays catching on the lens of his glasses cascading a similar pattern as the quartz crystals in the living room. I always knew our time was up and I would have to return home moments later.
There was a serene simplicity in the excursions in the backyard with homemade tools. My grandfather gave me old toothbrushes to clean off “artifacts” and promised me that even he used them in his travels. He was a man who was never dissatisfied with finding treasures in his own home and taught me the same appreciation through recipes for homemade fertilizer and life found beneath overturned rocks.
My experiences never slowed or ceased in the cycle of the seasons. I spent the early hours of the summer mornings watching the sunrise over the lake. I remember the sand cool in the spaces between my toes, the glass like lake illuminating with each color of the sky as the sun became higher. It reminded me of watercolors bleeding together in a cup of water when I needed to clean the brush. In the crisp fall afternoons I’d collect the leaves that changed color like chameleons. My grandfather would help me label and press them between the pages of one of his thick texts as my own personal artifact.
In the winter, broad icicles formed off of every hanging surface in Erie. I snapped them at the roots from the surfaces they clung to like a carrot from its stem and they instantly dampened my gloved hands as they melted from my body temperature. I liked the ones that were small enough for me to wrap my fingers around and suck on, like a stick of rock candy. But the ones larger than my grandfathers arm span were ideal for experiments. Cascading off of the roof of the house, it would take both him and I to detach one and lay it on the stoop to be examined. He pointed out variations in ripples on the surface where the water dripped into a freezing solid, sometimes bits of dirt and leaves suspended within. My favorite part was fetching a piece of sidewalk chalk to keep track of its slowly shrinking size. I’d make a Pepto-Bismol colored dash on the cement each dash and watch how each mark came slightly under the last. It was a valuable lesson I learned among countless others: just because you cannot see a process in motion doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Then as the spring sun woke from hibernation, all that remained of the giant icicle was a photograph taken by my grandmother of a dark blot on the sidewalk with a few faded pink lines
In the spring many of my afternoons were spent inside because of the torrential rains, but this was no more of a confinement than a bruise or scraped knee. My learning did not stop. It was in these thunder-rumbling afternoons that I traveled to new lands. I explored caves, floated in the Dead Sea, and prodded volcanic rock. Because of his occupation, my grandfather went above and beyond the minimum knowledge of his area of study. He was a human sponge where all facts of our world were the spilt milk; it was crucial that he sopped up every last drop. It was this, which led him to faraway places, returning home with ethnic trinkets, rock samples and best of all slides. I was grateful for the turquoise jewelry, boxes made of bamboo or some other exotic wood, and even the tribal flute. The rocks he brought back fascinated me, sparkling under the dust filled lamplight as he turned them over for me to look at in his palm. Still nothing seemed to compare to the moments frozen in time.
An old cotton sheet served as a projector screen as my grandfather clicked through photos projected with a slight mustards tint on the white cotton. I remember sitting on my favorite olive cushion on the cold cement floor of the cellar, bathed in the golden light of the projector. I was transported to the places my grandfather had visited as he recaptured the moments in the photos. The whirring of the projector transported me from that cellar onto a motorboat drifting down the Amazon or a plane soaring over the Andes. Like his rocks, each slide had a story. I loved the man with the sienna wrinkles and white turban that seemed to glow contrasted to his unearthly skin. His caught off-guard smile in the still made me feel as if I knew him. As my grandfather explained his generosity of insisting the group stay over night with the added bonus of a free meal. The women with veiled faces entranced me, their eyes twinkling like sapphires and amethysts as they peeked out from the black material of their burqas. I came to learn the only skin allowed to show was the patch around their eyes and slope of their nose. I learned not to question it because it is a way of life just as I wore Oshkosh overalls and Keds. No one questioned that.
Whether soiling my knees in the dirt or clicking the projector button, all of my experiences weave a web of my childhood. In the center a single pastime incorporates everything I’ve learned from him. We dabbled outside the yard we knew so well on occasion. My grandfather would show me places that few Pennsylvanians came to appreciate. He sought out the places Mother Nature had secretly whispered in his ear to discover, untainted by others footprints. And so began our infamous “creek walks.” He’d take my small hand in his, with his palms like sand just warmed in the sun, and we’d walk barefoot together, letting the creek water pour through our toes like estuaries. The flowing stream passing over our extremities fascinated me, merely swirling through and around us as if to say, “excuse me” politely and be on its way. I would bend down and let the water glide through the spaces between my fingers, sometimes discovering an interesting specimen, turning its muddy figure over in my hands, proudly displaying it to my grandfather asking, “What is this one called?” He’d smile and rub the grime from the object with a bit of stream water and the surface of his thumb. He always had an answer for me. And when I begged to add it to his collection at home and he’d simply tell me “I think the creek would miss it.” So I’d place the rock back in the water where the flow would stream around it as it did our feet just moments before. Once, believing I had discovered a new mineral, I was disappointed by a rusted Pepsi can, but he just chuckled, and told me that it was a part of the creek now too.
Our journey would continue, me splashing, soaking the clothes I insisted on wearing rather than a bathing suit, my grandfather pointing to trees and rocks, bending down and scooping mud or soil between his callused palms to show me its contents. And when I began to stifle yawns to avoid a car ride back for my nap, he’d say “Well, lets do this again,” turn his face toward the sky and inhale, his chest swelling. I’d imitate, my chest more like a robin’s breast compared to his. Then he’d scoop me up and I’d lay my cheek on his shoulder, instantly sedated by his musk that reminded me of fresh rain. In the car as my eyes grew droopy with sleep I’d trace the lines on his hand, stained with soil, and can now only think of how much that hand resembles the photographs of canyons in the confines of his textbooks. Perhaps it was the atmosphere that nourished all five senses: the light breaking through the canopy like cut out’s on construction paper, the gurgling currents, the sharp scent of pine, velvety moss under my toes or the tang of airborne pollen. Late mornings melted into early afternoons the days we navigated the creeks and those memories remain as vivid in my memory as if I was 12 years younger yesterday.
Less and less do I observe children with grass-stained knees and mud-streaked cheeks. Videogames and interactive TV shows have replaced outdoor explorations and curious little fingers. I miss the familiar curiosity of squatting over a potato bug, budging it with my small knuckle, never losing fascination when it curls up into a brown beadlike ball. I want to return to the days where I picked the seed pods of my grandmother’s geraniums and held them in my hand, startling slightly as the pod popped inside out like a corn kernel from the heat of my hand. But most of all I miss the time spent with a man who influenced every facet of my life as it’s lived today. My grandfather taught me things that could be found in a teacher’s syllabus, but it was the way he taught me that could never compare to any textbook. His profession as an educator allowed him to do so but he has a gift that makes anyone stop and turn their ear as soon as he begins to speak. I explored caves, climbed Mount Everest, marveled at mysterious Pyramids and fondled precious geodes. I had my own personal observatory and excavation site complete with tools. I drank teas from faraway lands that tasted like colors and shapes. My picture books were texts filled with the photographs of earth anatomy with hair of Redwood trees, skin of desert sand dunes, and veins of exotic rivers. I knew nothing of the Crayola crayon box colors. Brown depended on whether the dirt in the garden was wet with rain or parched dry. The true hue or red was a mere flicker in the air from the wing of a cardinal, and if you weren’t sharp you’d miss it.
It wasn’t until my visits became less and less that I realized the impact my grandfather has made. As an adult of twenty I look back in photo albums to a girl with an oversize t-shirt nearly covering her gangly legs. She holds a chunk of foreign rock out proudly to the photographer in her upturned hand. She is tucked beneath the arm of a man with russet skin and goose down hair. His half-smile only makes the life in his eyes more pronounced. He is proud of her and soon I find myself 6 again, hand in hand with my grandfather, creek water tickling my ankles.
