Grandfather

I had an odd night of it, tossing and turning, waking up to the orange glare of the unreliable streetlamps oozing out over wet black pavement. I’d gone to bed feeling rather disgruntled and resentful, shut drawers with an emphatic bang and brushed my hair with short, irritated strokes,and then jumped into bed, thinking sleep would come easy.

I’d gone to bed reading The Rule of St. Benedict for my Humanities class and the line

If you have a dispute with someone, make peace with him before the sun goes down,

echoed in my head. I thought I could also easily slip “yourself” in there too, but I turned over to avoid the orangey accusation of civilization and must have fallen back asleep.

This particular section of my Humanities course is difficult for me. My grandfather was a monk at the Abbey of the Genesee, about five minutes down the road by car from my university. I spent one week of my childhood summers in one of the beautiful retreat houses: Cana, Bethany, Nazareth. Most often Bethany, a sprawling nine bedroom house with an open front porch and expansive backyard, where my extended family gathered to play guitar on the porch, barbecue, and regather. In my mind, I wander through each room of that house; my fingers dance through the pages of the guestbook, where I can trace my childish handwriting from 1998, logging us in.

Geneseo isn’t a foreign place for me–it’s tied to a man with eyes as blue as an autumn day, lively and snapping. I walked into class today to a Gregorian chant and stopped dead in the doorway, a painful deep cut welling up somewhere in the place that still cries for my grandfather. And at the same time, a beautiful rush of relief and peace. It cries home to me.

The slow, steady chant stirs memories of attending Vespers in the cool, circular chapel, with colored light slivering in from stained glass chunks set in the wall and the hard, straight-backed wooden pews that I would wriggle impatiently in as a child.

I sat down in my chair, suddenly remembering the dream I’d had, the one that had woken me up to the streetlamps. The one that had given me funny prickles all morning, a memory that demanded to be remembered.

I had dreamed of my grandfather last night. He was visiting me at college and I as so excited to show him everything. I don’t particularly recall much about the dream, other than the way his face lit up when he saw me. I never got the chance to tell him I was coming to Geneseo, even though he’d gently suggested it in the numerous emails he sent me, as I applied to college. I was often “too busy” to respond. I was to attend Hamilton College and go abroad to Germany–things he would also never find out.

I remember sitting in the car, driving up the long path to the Abbey for his funeral, keeping it together, my stomach as clenched as the fists I bunched in my black dress. At his funeral, one of the monks greeted us at the door. He clasped my hand warmly.

“Welcome Amy,” he said gently. “He was so proud of you, you know.”

I have never felt so unworthy. I remember “Thank you” somehow spilling out along with all the tears I’d been holding back the three and a half hours up to the Abbey. I never knew what it was to cry for so long that you ran out of tears, and could only shake dryly, your body emptied of everything. Even almost four years later, he still brings tears to my eyes, a violent physical emotion that I’m unaccustomed and uncomfortable with. He is buried in the back of the Abbey, one of many simple wooden crosses, and I want to visit his grave, sink to my knees, and ask for the answers I don’t have.

There is a photo of me meeting my grandfather for the first time, as soon as I was adopted from Korea. There is a love and a light between us that I feel even now. I walked the grounds of Bethany when I moved into the dorms freshman year.

“I’m here,” I said simply, sitting on the front porch, where I’d sung songs with my uncle and watched my cousins. “I’m back.” This is why I’m at college here. It felt right. There was something pulling me back to where I needed to be, and I try to remember it on nights like this. The ghosts of my childhood whisper all around this place, and next year, when I have a car, I think I will walk those grounds much more.

The Cana house is where I met my grandfather for the first time. The Bethlehem house is where my father stayed when he asked my grandfather for my mother’s hand in marriage. The Nazareth house we stayed at one summer when Bethany was booked. And Bethany. Bethany is the towering house of my dreams, full of antique furniture and memories.

I want to go to Vespers soon. Visit his grave in the dying sunlight. Try and remember what he taught me about peace and love by his example. Help me quiet the noise in my head. I’m here. It’s for a reason.