i had been looking at his picture earlier today...i woke up the middle of the night and could not sleep...and somehow my thoughts fell back to him...
i remember so much about him and i began to recall off the little impressions that shaped his character in my eyes...
i was just a child and he was a man and i was just a little bit afraid of him...not because of him but because of the kind of abuse that i had suffered at the hands of the men in my life who were supposed to be there to protect me made me afraid of all men...
it probably didn't help his case too much that nearly everytime i saw him as a child he was intoxicated...forget that...he was drunk...i remember one of my friends told me that he was the drunkest man the he had ever seen...now that's pretty doggone drunk...
as i think about it now...i have to wonder what happened in his lifetime that made him so desperate to escape his reality...was there an incident in his past growing up in the deep south in the days of jim crow's america or perhaps it was something in his military service during the war...could it have been something that he experienced in alabama during the civil rights movement...or could it have been the pain of the seperation between he and the woman he loved best...
even in his drunkenness...he was funny and entertaining...in fact...it didn't seem strange to me that this man's speech was always slurred and that he was always leaning and that he smelled like he needed a bath...it was just who he was...
even in that...i can remember the dollars he would give us to go to kays corner to buy penny cookies and now&laters and ritz sodas...
i can remember him calling me 'nassau' (never did figure that out - wish i'd asked him while i still could)...or he would call me black @$$ gal and loved to ask me who my momma was..
i can remember when he used to chase the woman who he loved best around her house...come here, lillie...you know you still love me and she would half heartedly curse him out and would act like she was going to throw something at him...i would love to have seen them together...it was something i never saw in my lifetime..
the few times that i can remember him being sober...he was a quiet man...with a soft voice and sad eyes...full of intelligent words and kind gestures...
i only wish i'd known him better...because although i didn't realize it at the time...he was showing me love in the only way he knew how...
but i did not recognize it as love all those years ago...
it has taken me 32 years to recognize the love of my grandfather...
i wish he was still around so that i could express my gratitude and show him that love in return...
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