For the last two weeks I guess I have had a case of writer’s block. I’ll sit down to write, and partly do so, but soon discover a hour and half has passed by and the only thing I’ve really done is move some sentences around and change the order the paragraphs are in. The accomplishments of the following evening are generally confined to moving everything back. The feeling has a claustrophobic quality to it, but it is a rainy morning, and so I’ll try again.

Somewhere I had seen the sentence, “It’s a blessing and curse to feel things so very deeply.” I had been thinking of my grandfather, John Walker, and for whatever reason linked that quote to him. In such regard I have started and stopped a hundred times, a few on a computer screen but most in my mind.

My grandfather was his family’s only son and would become its only male. His father skipped out never to be seen or heard from again, and in that regard he proved himself to be a true “Walker.” They say my grandmother, Margaret, would tell a story that while they were living in Cherokee a man stopped by the house one day asking for John. He wasn’t home, but she invited him to come back around later. He never did. She’d later remark she had a strong feeling it was his father, and that he bore a striking resemblance to him.

Whether it was or not, who knows? I do know we spend part of our life wondering who some of those closest to us are. I see nothing wrong with devoting a little speculation to who a stranger is.

My earliest memories of my grandfather find him seated at the end of grandmother’s long dining room table, with his elbow resting on it, his fingers straight up, and a lit cigarette between them.   He’d sit there in silence, thinking, while behind him, through the haze of smoke, a police scanner made intermittent noise. Occasionally he’d raise an objection about one thing or another, with grandmother replying, “Oh, hubba,” from the kitchen.

By this time he had worked long enough to retire twice. The first was from the railroad in Cherokee. The second was from Firestone Tire in Des Moines. The cigarettes would have been a companion to him at both places and at the latter one would have dangled from his lips while his hands were busy wrapping and unwrapping asbestos from the pipes he worked on. These pipes were his specialty, though from time to time he was asked to work on others.

There was a story that a toilet clogged in one of the restrooms at Firestone. My grandfather was asked to see what he could do to unplug it. Evidently, one could use air to back pressure the lines, and he did–using a great deal of it. The end result was that he blew two men through their stall doors and re-plastered the ceiling. I was inclined to think the story had some stretching done to it. But when my grandfather passed after my senior year of high school, I heard the story mentioned several times by his former coworkers during the visitation.

I don’t know why he smoked his first cigarette. There are all kinds of reasons to be allured to it. I remember a few myself, but once the habit is acquired I suppose there are only a couple which maintain it. For some it seems to calm their nerves, and for others it is a subtle form of defiance. The latter was the case with my grandfather.

They owned the house right next to Highland Park Funeral Home on Sixth Avenue. He was told by the banker when he borrowed the money that he’d never be able to pay it back. He did, and the same persistence that bought it refused to give in and sell it as the neighborhood lost its shine. While some of his coworkers succumbed to the asbestos they had handled in their job, he kept smoking his way to his mid-eighties, and he kept driving too.

Often they drove out to the farm, and he would take up residence on the porch swing or on a folding chair beneath the large cedar next to it, tucked away in the shade, smoking, and thinking. All these years later, I wonder what it was he was thinking about. All those years ago, I never thought of asking him.

There exists a concept of the “invested child,” which simply states that in any family one child is going to be more sensitive to the happenings within the family than the others. Generally, this child is the oldest or the youngest, the only child of a particular sex, or a child which had a heightened focus from the rest of the family (due to a health issue, for instance).

The claim is that this child feels things deeper and more intensely than the other children and has a harder time bringing the feelings to a state of resolution. They may elect to try and stumble their way through those feelings, or they may get bottled up in themselves. Either way, it can be more difficult for the invested child to “function” in the day to day activities of their contemporaries.

The unspoken assumption, of course, is that the day to day functioning of our contemporaries is what we should be striving for. I don’t believe the contemporaries will mind when I say that any proof of that I find circumstantial at best.

If he was an “invested child,” if from time to time he was locked up in his own thoughts, I also know there was something about him his contemporaries could readily relate to. I remember he would haul us as kids to the mall with my grandmother, and as we grew older our family would meet them in there. Grandma would go about her shopping while he found a place out in the open to sit and smoke. Never did we return to find him unaccompanied, instead he would be there, chatting away with whomever happened by, and as we left he would tell us about all those he had been talking to.

Somehow, more often than not, when we get that sense of loneliness, we wind up spending time with those who have an even better acquaintance with it. Many times we find them without even knowing their story at first.

The final few times he was out, on the porch or under the tree, I remember him with his loafers on, socks pushed down, pant legs pulled up, and his tired and swollen legs running between them. The cigarette now dangled between two fingers of a drooped hand, whose elbow was resting on a knee, as though the weight of the cigarette had finally worn them all out.

“Don’t get old, Danny. Don’t ever get old,” he spoke as he rubbed his legs. I remember him saying that as though it was yesterday, as though his defiance was finally starting to give out. I’m sure it will still seem like yesterday whenever tomorrow shows up. He had a gripe, and even I, who could only stand and watch from the perspective of uneducated youth, could see that there was validity to it.

He wasn’t the first man to sit in the shade with a gripe. The biblical Jonah did. I bet Jonah would have been smoking too, had he any cigarettes, but that is another story for another time. And while the fact that he married a woman from Faith, South Dakota, shouldn’t be a surprise, it too will have to wait.