I went to my grandparents’ funeral last weekend in Vermont, which is where they spent most of their twilight years. I’m not exactly sure how long they were married, but it was a ridiculously long time, like 78 years or something like that. My grandfather died last year on December 5, my grandmother died this year on July 20. They received a three-volley salute from a military honor guard since they were both World War II Army veterans.
My grandparents met on an Army hospital ship somewhere in the Pacific theater during the war. Supposedly my grandfather got into a fight with another John Zehner (a Navy man, too, just to make it even more infuriating) on their first date, and only managed to get the other guy to back off from hitting on my grandmother by pulling rank. I can believe it. My grandmother was a beautiful redhead who probably didn’t have much trouble getting dates, whereas my grandfather looks like the same grandfather I’ve always known in every photo I’ve ever seen of him dating back to the 1950s. Only the background and the width of his tie ever seemed to change.
My grandmother was a nurse, my grandfather one of the commanding officers on that ship. Since it was a hospital ship back in the days when people were still somewhat civilized and had rules about war and not carpet bombing hospitals, there weren’t any munitions allowed on the ship except for three small pistols. My grandfather was given one.
“I thought it was for protecting me from the nurses,” he explained later.
Maybe that really was the case. Besides being a knock-out, my grandmother was supposedly a wild party girl who liked to drink scotch and smoke cigars while she stayed up late and danced, at least according to my grandfather who was a bit more strait-laced than her. But, my grandfather also used to tell me that I was the illegitimate son of my mother and the butano man, the technician who would bring butane to my parent’s house when they were living in Spain.
“You look more and more like butano man every time I see you,” he would tell me whenever I visited, “Not like your father at all.” Maybe that’s the case, too. I am kind of swarthy.
So, maybe, like any good grandpa, most of the things he told me as a kid probably weren’t true. Like how prior to World War II he had been asked by the army to go to medical school after passing an intelligence test, but couldn’t go because he was addicted to bromide at the time. He carried the bromide around in a flask and was constantly taking sips from it, and he would get the shakes if he stopped. I guess his nerves weren’t real good.
I always forgot to look up what bromide actually was, or what it was used for, and it wasn’t until the funeral last week–at least ten years after he told to me this–that I finally found out.
“Well, it’s a sedative,” my brother told me after he did a quick search online, “and it causes the inhibition of erections.”
Maybe it was a true story and my grandfather was addicted to bromide–although I don’t know why, the side effects are clearly pretty terrible–but my parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles had never heard of this story before, and every other story from the war had been repeated probably hundreds of times. It makes me wonder. Well, I’m just going to assume it’s true. There’s nobody left to ask.
Giving my grandparents a score would just be in bad taste.
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