Captain John

CAPTAIN JOHN -

Captain John.  The name itself conjures up romantic and adventurous images of a man and the sea.  Indeed, Captain John and his crew braved the coastal waters off Washington and Canada and as far North as Alaska, as they fished for their legal limits of Halibut.  He was a commercial fisherman and an immigrant Norwegian who owned his own ship.  She was named ‘The Bergen’, after the capital city of Norway.   

 Upon his safe return, he would deliver his catch to the famous Pike Place Market, and when we visited there,  the vendors and fisherman alike would call out their greetings to Captain John.  He carried me astride his shoulders, and although I loved to be there with my grampa, I did not like the smell of fish that was all-pervasive. Every vendor had his share of blood on his white apron and each stall displayed their catch of crab, shrimp, salmon, halibut or tuna.  It was a bustling and colorful place and he would proudly introduce his little grand-daughter whenever the opportunity arose.

For me,  Captain John was my ‘grampa’ and he was a jolly and gregarious man.  If it weren’t for his bald head and beardless face, he would have been the spitting image of Santa Claus.  He had a jolly round face and the soft belly for it, and his few remaining hairs were already white.  Whenever grampa came to visit, he invariably had a Hershey’s chocolate bar hidden on him, and little Pam got to find which pocket it was in!  It was a good game because, when he wasn’t out at sea, Captain John liked to dress up in suits and vests and an overcoat too.   So there were lots of pockets, hence lots of hiding places.

Grampa loved to sing out loud and he loved to dance. I would ask to dance with him, and he would sweep me up into his arms with a great ‘Ya sure, ya betcha’, as he danced to a polka playing on the phonograph player in the living room of that two-bedroom brick house in the Queen Ann district of Seattle,  Washington in 1949.

When my grandparents were still young, they had met on the ship that carried them from the old world to the new one. ‘The old country’ was the typical way that people of my grandfather’s generation referred to Norway.  It was a curious designation to the child I was: I wondered what made a country old?  I assumed that all old people must have come here from an old country, since all of the friends of my grandparents were old and Norwegian.

My grandfather was highly entertaining to the little girl that I was, boisterous and gregarious, while Gramma Gertie was quite the opposite of him.  She was the embodiment of ‘long-suffering’. She never smiled, not even for photographs, and she barely spoke.  In fact, I do not recall whether she actually spoke English.  I only remember one word of my gramma’s and that was ‘ooftah’.  In my childhood memory, it was her defining word:  ‘Ooftah’ – it was uttered with a great outflow of breath that seemed to convey all of her pain and exhaustion as she served my grampa like a long-suffering servant.  The word as it came forth from her seemed weighted down with a sense of burden and the futility of life. 

I believe it was Louise Hays who wrote that diabetes, as an illness, reflects the inability to allow any sweetness into one’s life.  And my grandmother seemed to have forsaken sweetness a long time before.  I often felt her pain and sadness as I witnessed her giving herself insulin injections into her perpetually bruised thighs and hips. Bruised from those daily insulin injections.

As Captain John’s first grandchild, I was naturally ‘the apple of his eye’, though it hadn’t always been that way.  The news of my pending arrival had been anything but a cause for celebration. My mother was just a child herself, at a time when the whole world was heading to war.  Her marriage to my father had been an elopement – an impetuous attempt to secure their love in a perilous and unstable world.  She immediately became pregnant with me. She was only 17, and none of this played well with Captain John, who reportedly ‘threw her out on the street’.  

But the birth of his first grandchild became a cause for reconciliation.  Over those first few years of life, with my own father enlisted in the Navy,  grampa was the masculine center of my world.

One afternoon, when I was about 6 years old, I was at home with my grandmother and anticipating the return of grampa.  We heard him singing as he climbed the stairs that ascended from the garage.  He was returning home from an afternoon of drinking and story-telling at the local tavern.  As he approached the dining room, where I was standing with gramma, he entered with a song and great bravado.  My gramma happened to be standing adjacent to his path.  Striding forward with great exuberance and staggering a bit as well,  he inadvertently pushed her aside. 

His push knocked her to the floor. 

I watched in horror, as she lay there on her back.  Although she was not seriously injured, she made no effort to rise up. I dropped to the floor beside her. I felt a need to defend her, to protect her.   I was also determined that I would stop my grampa from ever doing such a terrible thing to my gramma!  How could he do that, just knock her down to the ground while he kept on singing and laughing?  I stood up to my full three-foot height and did the only thing that made sense to me.  I spoke to him with great conviction:  “You mustn’t ever hurt my gramma like that.  If you ever do that again, if you ever hurt my gramma again, then you are not my grampa anymore!”

In my young and naive mind, I believed that love had the power to change him, that love had the power to transform all things.  I was certain that my grampa loved me, so I thoroughly expected that he would meet my challenge, he would see my resolve, he would understand that it was wrong to get drunk and push gramma and certainly, he would not want to lose me.  Surely he would feel my conviction and be compelled to promise that he would never do such a thing again!  I fully expected he would repent and everything would be alright.  I would have my grampa, he would be a good grampa, he would not drink anymore and he would never, never hit my gramma again.

Instead --- he laughed!  I had mustered up all of my 6-year old courage and challenged him “You will not be my grampa anymore!”  And he laughed!    He never even missed a beat. He never apologized, he never reached down to help my gramma get up.  He just kept on singing, and dancing around the living room.

I was utterly unprepared to face the failure of my childish strategy. But in my child’s logic, I found that what I now had to face was the loss of my grampa.  I had put everything on the line, confident as only a 6-year-old could be, that my ultimatum, and love itself, would inspire him to see the folly of his ways. He was, however, unphased and unrepentant.

I, on the other hand, was painfully disillusioned.  Grampa took me by my reluctant and no longer trusting hand, leading me down the concrete stairs that were carved in between the rockery beds that formed their steep front yard.  It was time for him to drive me back to my parents’ home.  We climbed into his pale green, 1948 Mercury with the convertible top, we drove down the streets and boulevards of Queen Ann Hill.  The top was down, the wind was tousling my frizzy permed hair as we drove across the Ballard Bridge, and Grampa was singing at the top of his lungs. 

He was entertaining himself and seemed oblivious to the decisions and choices that little Pam was making as she watched and listened in disbelief:  He doesn’t really love me – I don’t really matter very much.  Sad, shocked, and with an innocent belief in the absolute power of my words, of my intention, and the bottom line message of my impassioned declaration “You won’t be my grampa anymore”, I felt that I had lost my grampa… and that would be… forever.

                                                                                              ***

How many times and how many ways do we lose our innocence before we gain our wisdom?  I believe it depends on how much we are prepared to learn, or unlearn, in this lifetime.

At crucial moments along the journey of my life, I have agreed to extreme levels of commitment, dedication to ‘the path’, awakening to the Truth.  I never truly knew what that meant.  I could only ‘move in that dynamic’, hold out that intention, seeking the deepest truths within myself.  And where I came out was surely a different place than was expected.  Always surprising.