i have been blessed with a remarkable memory. sometimes, when talking to my mom, i'll bring up someone i remember holding me when i was little and usually it's someone who only held me before i was a year old. one of those memories was that of my great-grandpa winker.
i told her i remembered him holding me on the front porch of the house. i remember reaching out to touch his wrinkles because at the time he was the oldest thing i'd ever seen. though i didn't really comprehend what that meant. so he was actually the wrinkliest person i knew. which is impressive since i mostly knew babies. and they all look like crying balls.
since a very early age i've been a toucher. i feel the need to touch, or pick something off of, everything i walk past. walls, fences, leaves, flowers...cheek wrinkles. i remember being so fascinated by his face. needless to say, had to touch it. and he let me. i just remember him being gentle and kind looking. i remember his voice as something almost tangible. rattly and rather high pitched from age. not unlike marbles rolling down a corrugated metal tube. that was my first interaction with him. i know there were more in the few years following but my world was getting bigger and there were more things to touch and i could get to them unaided now so i'm sure some people contact was forgotten in the toddler to pre-k blur.
but i remember clearly going to visit him in the hospital shortly before he died. i went with my mom and dad. great-grandpa winker was in a hospital bed. i remember being puzzled as i had a clear idea of what he was supposed to look like. and this wasn't it. i remember the smells. sterility and flowers. that's how i remember it now. though, i wouldn't have been able to put it to words then. it probably would have smelled like my finger because i could often be found with it knuckle deep in nostrile land. THERE'S GOLD IN THEM THERE HOLES! but i digest. anyhoo. my mom was sitting next to him and i was standing next to my dad. i couldn't stop staring. he caught my eye and held out his hand and i walked over to him. i remember him saying things to me but i couldn't remember what the words were. maybe he didn't say anything. who knows. i just stared at his hands. i had never seen hands like that before. i had never seen hands that translucent before. so boney. i remember softly pinching a little of his skin. and looking at my own hands and at that point wondering how many thousands of years it would take my hands to look like that. at that age the future was measured in millenia. and parsecs (as i'd just seen star wars for the first time.)
well, we eventually left the nursing home/hospital and i instanly tried to distract myself from the experience with literally anything else at all. it wasn't that i was afraid. i was just in sensory overload. probably ran around my grandparent's house for a while. buried, broke and set afire my inheritance aka star wars figures that could have probably netted me at least a couple semester's tuition.
. oh, yeah. funeral. here we go. so, shortly after that he died of a stroke. and his funeral was at the catholic church in carroll iowa. where my mom grew up. where her parents both grew up. blocks away from the house where her dad would later die in the exact same room he was born in. it was that kind of town. i had never been around that many old people in my life. i remember on the way into the church they have, which i was soon to find out were little wall basins with wet sponges in them and everyone that walked in touched the sponge and crossed themselves for the virgin mary. me? shit. i thought it was just some weird catholic drinking fountain. so, what did i do? well, i walked right up to that sumbitch and grabbed that sponge of "holy water", put it in my mouth and sucked some of that water out. i remember thinking that i hated catholic water fountains. that thought lasted only long a second as my mother's fingernails dug into my arm and my grandmother, looking half amused and half horrified quickly put the sponge back in the sacred basin or whatever. and i was ushered, by the collar, into the church for the viewing.
as i walked up to the casket i remember never having been around so many old people in my life. and, as my eyes were about waste high, or hung knuckle high, if you prefer, i noticed that all of their hands were like my great grandfather's. i jammed my hands in my pockets as hard as i could to try and curb my temptation to touch all of them. i figured that might be a good move, considering the whole sponge of god debacle from just minutes/hours? before. who could tell at that point? i got to the casket before my parents did but couldn't see in so i waited for them to reach me and lift me up for a view. i looked down at him in there and it was so surreal. his wrinkles were pretty much gone and his hands looked like regular hands. i was dumbfounded. i was about to reach out but then, presumably for the first time in my life, exercised restraint. i actually asked if i could touch his hands. permission was granted and a-touchin' i went.
the reason i thought about any of this is because a girl i dated a few years ago one day, exasperatedly asked me if i must touch EVERYTHING?! of course i did, i replied. been a toucher/destroyer since a very early age. to which she mockingly yelled out to no one in particular. "someone get this kid a leash!"
