Soapbox

Guardian Angel

My grandpa was about my best friend when I was little.
I was a strange kid, (“No!” you say, because you’re sweet. But yes, it’s true):  intense, moody, tending to be alone. I felt overshadowed by my pretty, creative older sisters and then by my very forceful younger one. But Grandpa made me feel like I was special.

He took me out canoeing at the cabin he had by the Big Darby, and when I got the hang of it more quickly than the other kids, he taught me how to steer from the back. I thought I was all that! He took all of his grandchildren fishing, but he called me his fishing partner and I believed he secretly loved me the best.
Probably all the grandchildren thought this- he was that kind of guy. But for me, there was nothing better than time spent with my Grandfather. I thought he was wonderful. He had a deep baritone voice, and used to sing little snatches of song when I would sit on his lap, usually something along the lines of “Oh, my little Tracy…oh, my little Tracy…” which made me feel safe and loved.

    When I was 13, he died suddenly following a surgery. The surgery itself had gone well, so my Aunt Patricia was going to Columbus to visit him in the hospital and it was decided she could take me with her. No visitors under the age of 16 were allowed on the floor in those days, so my sisters dressed me up in their clothes and even put a little makeup on me. I’m sure I fooled no one, but I felt really grown-up, and privileged to be chosen for the trip.
    Armed with an assortment of cards from my siblings we drove happily to Columbus, walked in the door of Mt. Carmel hospital, and knew right away that something was terribly wrong. My great Uncle Paul, all 6'5" of him, was standing like a sober sentinel in the lobby, waiting for us. He informed my aunt quietly that “something had happened” and Grandpa had gone “code blue” just a few minutes before.
    We went upstairs with Uncle Paul and the adults all huddled together, rallying around my grandmother. Since I was quiet and calm, I was pretty much left to my own devices as everyone waited for word and waited for other out of town family to make the drive to Columbus. I wandered up and down the hall, sat for a little and wandered some more, and suddenly a door opened and a bed was rolled out. There, surrounded by staff, IV's running and machines blinking, was my grandfather, being moved to the ICU. I recognized his face, but I remember thinking, "Oh, I see: my Grandpa is dead." Because it seemed clear to me that he wasn’t there any more.

    Eventually someone decided that in the hospital on a death watch wasn’t the best place for me, so my uncle David took me to his house to stay with my Aunt Sunny and cousin Karen. He brought me in and was just turning to go back to the hospital when the call came that Grandpa had died. Everyone started crying… except me. I already knew that he was dead, and had mulled it over in the car all the way to Uncle David’s house. I knew I wasn’t anyone’s fishing partner, any more.
   
  It was a big hole in my life, and summers were never the same without the cabin to visit. One day when I was 16 or 17 I realized that, while I could describe Grandpa to you, I no longer had, in my mind, an image of him. I could say “Probably about 5’9”, salt and pepper hair” but I couldn’t see him, inside me. I felt really sad, like he was truly gone at last. I felt like I had lost him all over again.

  Around this same time I started having fish dreams. They took one of two forms. In the first, I dreamed I was walking by a lake and saw, gliding far enough under the surface to be just barely visible, a huge fish, probably 8 or 10 feet long. Sometimes I was fishing when I saw it, and would pull my line in, fearful of hooking something so large that I could never reel in.
    Other times I was just walking by the lake and would stare in fascination at the murky image. The second, more frequent dream scenario involved aquariums full of tiny, bright fish who, when the lid was opened, would suddenly begin swimming out into the room, as if the air were water. They were so beautiful to see, floating happily about, but I somehow knew that the air was not good for them, and so I would try to gently herd them back into the aquarium quickly,. This was always a frustrating and only marginally successful venture.
    After a few years of these recurring dreams, I mentioned it to my sister Julie. She told me that probably it symbolized big things in my life I was afraid to face, and frustrations. Well I had big things in my life to face, I suppose- who doesn’t at 21? But the explanation didn’t make sense to me.

    And so the dreams went on.

    Then one night, in the middle of some other dream, suddenly my grandfather was there. I don’t actually remember this dream- I just woke up and knew this message he had given me:

You dream about fish because of me. Sometimes I come and visit you
when you’re asleep, which is the only time you can hear me now.
But when you wake up, because you were my fishing buddy,  when I
have touched you, you just remember it as fish. Fish means me.

    And I laid there in bed and thought, “Now that makes sense!” And so the next time I spoke to her, I told Julie what I had learned, and she nodded.  “That makes sense” she agreed. “Grandpa is a guardian angel, after all, so of course he would come to visit you. He’s watching over you.”
   I just looked at her, amazed and pleased that I hadn’t gotten any scientific theories about “random firing of neurons” and “working out anxieties of the day” this time. Those things were all perfectly logical, but this felt… true. It seemed to me that her ready acceptance of my spiritual explanation confirmed its truth. And who else would be a guardian angel for me but Grandpa?

    So then, the dreams were a welcome occurrence in my life. When I woke from one I would smile and think “Hello Grandpa! Do you like your new Great-grandson?” or whatever else had happened since the last  “visit”. They seemed to come less and less often once I was busy raising my family.

    Once or twice I had a dream where Grandpa was actually there, as himself. In the most memorable, my sisters, cousins and myself were all at the old house Grandmother and Grandpa had owned, visiting him. We were all our grown-up selves and had gone back into the past to see him. We brought stories and pictures of our present lives and our children to show him.
   He never spoke a word- he couldn’t, because he was a spirit, but he smiled and watched us all with obvious joy. We cousins had so much fun that we started just laughing and kidding around with each other and forgot to talk to him, sometimes. But that seemed to make him happy too- to see us good friends again. Then suddenly we realized that it was time to go “home”- and he couldn’t go to the future with us. We were so sad that we started to cry,  but he just looked at us, radiant. We knew he was saying that he would be there with us, we just wouldn’t see him.
   Each of us kissed him on the cheek and quietly left for our future lives.

    Then one night I had an entirely different dream. I was back at our old house on South Shannon Ave, in the front bedroom that contained the doorway up to the attic. I was about to get married there. My family watching happily from the hall doorway, I walked to the attic door to meet my anonymous husband for the ceremony.
    But the minister, supposed to be standing in the attic doorway, was standing IN the door- leaning out through the wood, grinning hideously and looking like some sort of demon. Frightened, I turned to my groom to see if he understood what was going on- and he had disappeared. Suddenly the demon had his huge hands around my throat and began to squeeze.  

    At this point I realized that I was dreaming. As the hands choked off my air supply, I thought, “Well crap- this is an awful dream! Now I just have to wake myself up and it will end.” I’ve done that before when a dream was frightening, but I just couldn’t do it this time. I heard a roaring in my ears and a terrible built pressure in my head as spots swam before my eyes. I knew that my actual body was lying in bed, right next to Ted. Perhaps he could wake me up.

   So I started shouting with my mind: Ted, help me! I don’t know what’s happening, but I think I’m dying! Touch me! Wake me up! But of course, I was asleep, and he was asleep, and he could not hear me. No one could hear me. My dream family was still standing smiling in the hall, as if they were witnessing a happy event. Everything began to go black and I believed with all my being that I was about to die in my sleep- perhaps I was having a freak heart attack, or maybe some weird sleep apnea that had stopped my breathing for too long. Or, maybe I really was wrestling with a demon! Who knew?

     And then I remembered that there is someone who can hear me in my sleep- someone who visits me in my dreams from time to time. I had no strength left to shout, even mentally. I whispered “Grandpa- help me wake up. Please… I have to wake up.”

    And I was sitting upright in bed, hands at my throat, gasping frantically for air as the room swam around me and Ted turned over groggily and asked if I was Ok. And I believe to this day that my grandfather saved my life. I mean, what else is a guardian angel for?

    I don’t dream about fish nearly as often as I used to- sometimes years will go by between nighttime “visits”. Is there an expiration date on guardian angels? Perhaps he doesn’t feel I need looking after as much as I used to. (Boy, is he wrong!) But I did have a different type of visit from him one day.

    A few years ago I was sorting through the box of old photos my sister had collected from aunts, uncles and second cousins, who had sent them to her so she could copy them to make a family album. I had enjoyed finding pictures of my father as a small, tow-headed boy with a mischievous smile on his face and my great-grandmother, lovely in her high-necked white blouse and Gibson-girl hair.  These photographs offered a wonderful glimpse into people and a time that I had never experienced.

     Suddenly my casually sorting hands were stilled and I drew in a slow breath. Among the sepia-tinted photos of my parents’ youth was an old color snapshot that I hadn’t seen in years. The colors in the somewhat blurry photo had faded and yellowed with the passing of time, but I saw the image as clearly as if I were looking though an open window. Gently, in a daze of memory, I put my hand out and slowly touched its surface. I was surprised to feel only paper: I had half-expected my fingers to reach right into the image itself and touch trees and grass…and his face.      
    The picture showed my grandfather standing in front of the cabin by the Big Darby where we spent so many glorious summers. He was wearing a white terry-cloth shirt with blue piping that I didn’t realize I remembered until the photo brought it back with such clarity that when I closed my eyes, I could smell his after shave on it. Grandpa’s hands were in his pockets and he was smiling unassumingly at the camera; a short man with grey-streaked hair who had lived a hard life but never seemed to worry too much about it. Behind him the sun dappled through the big walnut trees that stood guard over the cabin and the yard sloped away toward the river bank where he docked his canoe.

For just an instant, I could actually hear the wind sighing through the high branches and mixing with the rush of water, breathe the slightly fishy smell of the river, and of mud and rocks baking in the sun along the bank. It all flooded over me in a dizzying wash of memory. Somewhere there’s the burr of a lawn mower: Uncle Roy is cutting the grass I thought, and the sound of laughing children drifted upstream from the sandbar where I knew my cousins were swimming.

Now I hear Grandpa’s deep chuckle as he asks me if I’m ready to go fishing, and of course I am, yes, yes! Let’s go right now, Grandpa, and stay out all day. I want to hear the pride in your voice as you tell me how well I steer the canoe and call me your best fishing partner.

I reach to take his hand…  but I touched only an old piece of paper, a photograph from a box, and I was sitting on a chair in my sister’s kitchen again while my own children played in the next room.

Time’s window was closed again, and I was left shaken by what I saw and felt. That amazingly clear sensory memory of that brief moment in time was locked away in my brain somewhere, and seeing the photo had opened the door, or completed the neural circuit to allow me to access it for just an instant.
        And I know he is still with me.