Hard times of the Great Depression bred hard men, but my grandfathers with their leather-like hands, underneath all their gruffness, harbored tender hearts. Neither lived to see their great grandsons, though one of our boys has his great grandfather’s bright blue eyes. This blue-eyed grandfather lost his mother and several siblings in the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic that nearly took my grandfather’s life as well and abruptly ended his childhood. My grandfather’s father remarried and started a new family as my then young grandfather went to work in the gold mines now a boy on his own.
As our oldest blue-eyed son, Luke, turned 15, I thought about the life of my blue-eyed grandfather as a boy Luke’s age working too hard to smile and sleeping too tired to dream and wondering in the darkness of the mines what happened to the bright family he’d known before the Spanish flu.
Yesterday, Luke’s blue-eyed grandfather, the son of the blue-eyed boy who grew into a man working in the gold mines, got angry because we didn’t make Luke work on Labor Day, which was also Luke’s birthday. Luke already spent this summer after graduating 8th grade working for my dad. Our son who once lived for soccer now learning boyhood ball games give way to blistered hands and bills in his wallet. And how I hate this: Luke pressured to grow up. And I fight to keep Luke a boy as my dad fights to make him a man, and I wonder what to make of childhood slipping away like Luke’s chair slipped out from under him last night at the dinner table after he’d blown out his candles. How Luke crashed down, slamming his face against our wooden table, a monstrous sound, receiving a bruised and bloody cheek for his birthday.
Today I think of my grandfathers, gruff and tender, the decisions they made and decisions made for them, circumstances and choices a tapestry turning boys to men. Too far back all this goes for me to know the mothers who raised my grandfathers. Mothers the world over opening their mothers’ arms to relinquish their boys to men as I relinquish Luke to God, the Keeper of mothers and men.
Photos:
Top: Luke driving the four-wheeler. His little brothers helping him work this summer.
Middle: Luke’s 8th grade graduation, Scott (one of his teachers) handing Luke his diploma.
Bottom: Luke, Scott, and me during Cami and Drew’s wedding. Luke waiting to walk me down the aisle while Scott waits for our daughter the bride.
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