Buster

Dad’s dad, whom I and many others only knew as “Buster” would’ve been 103 today. Longevity wasn’t in the cards for him, though, and he passed away in 1987. What I recall most vividly about his death is that it required me and my sister to come home from 4-H camp mid-way through the week, which was disappointing because that was the year I’d finally made my peace with overnight stays away from home and parents. At the time, having the opportunity to make ice cream in a coffee can ranked just a half step higher than coming home for Buster’s funeral. He’d been ill for quite some time, but even so, my nine-year-old priorities left a lot to be desired.

I once made a website collecting all of the genealogy I’d done for Dad’s family, back to the first Grimsaburger who landed in the Virginia colony sometime in the mid-17th century, but it’s evaporated into the ether since then. Anyway, I’d written a bit there about what I remembered of Buster. Among the impressionistic memories which have by now coalesced into canon: his addiction to bubble gum–the kind that came as a single small, pink, individually wrapped piece, as well as his habit of leaving perfectly round knobs of chewed gum on the arms of those adirondack chairs he had sitting in the yard. Also his habit of sitting out by his u-pick strawberry patch with a BB gun to shoot birds who dared to come in for a snack. Also his habit of wearing “dead man’s clothes,” those given to him by widows. And his insistence that Blackie, his black lab mutt, was “gettin’ fat off them Blackie bones!”–the bones he picked up from the barbecue joint for dog snacks. You should know that there was little meat or anything else of substance left on the bones, so Blackie getting anything but a good workout for her teeth and jaws was pretty unlikely. Blackie would leave those bones in the shade of the tobacco barn, and JJ and I would dig through the sandy soil with them. Because we were grubby kids, that’s why.

Buster had a half-barrel by the shop, under the mulberry tree, where he kept minnows, and JJ and I would try, and fail, and try, and fail to catch them with our hands. The small farm that seemed so much bigger when I was little had plots for tobacco, corn, strawberries, vegetables, potatoes, and a small grape arbor. For the tomatoes in summer, he kept a salt shaker in the garage. For the kids in the neighborhood, and people who came to avail of his services as a small-engine repairman and welder, he kept a coke machine in the shed. For himself and us, he kept mini-Milky Ways inside the coke machine. I’ve turned into an anti-soda evangelist since then, but even now, it would take me a half second to snap up an orange soda or Big Red in a glass bottle if offered.

There are some water fountains on campus that taste just like well water, and I still think first of Buster’s water when I have to resort to those. Not all sense memories are as pleasant as sugary, ice-cold red soda, but they always seem to be the strongest. I remember the smell of the garage, almost the same as Dad’s, especially if he’s been welding in the summer. I remember the smell of his house–well water permeates everything, as does coal smoke and a steady diet of meat and root vegetables. I remember walking in to the din of car races on the TV–he turned a bit deaf in old age. And I remember the drawer where he kept that bag of bubble gum, and JJ and I calculating how many pieces we could take without him knowing. In addition to being grubby kids, we also had a touch of thievery in us, I guess.

For each of the dozen things I know about Buster, there are a hundred more I’d like to know. It was in the midst of the genealogy project that I saw the enormous Buster-and-Helen-shaped hole in my knowledge. It seems wrong somehow that I don’t know every last thing about people just two generations removed from myself, all the more so when I’d stumble upon some record that told me something essential about people several generations removed, or people I’m not related to in the slightest. Maybe this is just the obsessive memoirist in me, that part of me that has insisted on keeping a journal for twenty years so I don’t forget anything, which is the same part of me that insists on keeping a blog so you don’t forget either. All four of you.

Anyway, happy birthday, Buster. Here’s hoping you get to shoot blackbirds to your heart’s content on the other side.