Maybe Grandpa Cal was right all along

When I was a kid working for Lee Roy Hays, I lived with him anytime I wasn’t in school. He paid me $50 a week. He didn’t know it but I’d have worked for free because I enjoyed it so much.

Anyway…

There was an old rickety camp trailer out back under a huge willow tree where grandpa Cal lived. He was Lee Roy’s father in law, and he was a war veteran and who knows what else… all I ever knew was he was just old.

He didn’t seem like he was all there because he always asked my name… I’d tell him I was Don and he’d say Don, Don-nod (he always tried to spell things backwards), but most of the time he just called me lad even though I just told him what my name was five minutes before.

We called him Grandpa Cal, but his given name was Calvin Moore.

Grandpa Cal mostly just sat in one of those old steel lawn chairs and passed the time rolling bugle boy, and watching the birds and critters. I never saw him clean shaven but he never grew a beard, he always just looked like he hadn’t shaved in three days.

I think grandpa Cal would just look out his camper window and wait for a light to come on in Lee Roy’s house of a morning so as he could walk over and drink some Sanka and visit. Grandpa Cal wouldn’t take anything without paying for it, and he always left a quarter on the table for the coffee when he left. There were a few times he’d be broke and he would insist on doing the dishes if he didn’t have any change.

Grandpa Cal was content just living out his last days sitting in that steel lawn chair smoking bugle boy, watching the critters, drinking coffee, with an occasional walk to the outhouse.

I use to think he wasn’t all there, but the older I get… I think the more with it he seemed to be.