My Grandfather

I never knew him as a well man. Not really, anyway. I remember when I used to stay with him and my grandmother while my parents worked. We'd walk to the little store a few blocks away from their house. I always got the orange push-up popsicle, in the paper tube. I remember that he always insisted I kiss him goodbye, and I'd climb up on his easy chair with him and pretend I didn't like that his big mustache tickled my face, giggling all the while.

I remember him teaching me to make a fist correctly: thumb outside the fingers so you don't compress it if you hit hard. I remember him winking at me over cards when we played against my parents up at the cabin, and how he would watch as I threw the tennis ball off the big concrete wall behind their house, practicing fielding it with a baseball glove it barely fit in.

I remember him lying in a bed, dying. I remember how he confused me for his son and kept calling me Bobby on one visit. My grandmother said it was because he missed my uncle being there. I remember that right up until the day he died, grandpa had the biggest, strongest, hands of any man I've ever seen. Working man's hands, with thick nails, connected to huge arms.

My father always said my temper and fight came from him. "It's the Assyrian," dad would say. Sometimes it sounded like a criticism, sometimes like a compliment. My mother and sister have it too. If you ever really hurt me, I'll send my mother and sister after you.

I remember pictures and vignettes of my grandfather. That's as much as I got to know him.

Today, someone made a comment, like the ones I've heard all my life, about people with middle eastern sounding names. They kept pointing out Barack Obama's middle name, Hussein. The implication was clear: "we" can't trust "them."

I ranted about how my grandfather, a Christian, as all the Assyrians I've personally known are, served his country, joined the American Legion, raised his kids as all-American kids. I told the guy he was a bigot.

But sometimes, words don't mean much. I wish I'd been face to face with the jerk, so I could show him how my Assyrian-American grandpa taught me how to make a fist.