To Dust

Why had I stopped going? Or perhaps the question was, why was I going now, after - what had it been? - ten years? Guilt, that quality the Catholic faith, the one whose symbols made up the decorating scheme of his tiny, first floor apartment, had so deeply instilled in me? Or maybe just the sudden realization that each visit now - the man was pushing eighty after all - might be the last. Still, was any of this incentive enough to tolerate our differences?

Baseball! Hmm. Maybe we still had that in common. After all, he was the one who introduced me to the game.

When I suggested, after the usual long silences between us, that we turn the set to Pete Rose and company, he was - Eureka! - all smiles. By the second inning, however, his wrinkled face had grown sullen. "There's a lot of blacks who play that game today, huh?" Oh oh. Here we go again; time to switch to non-commitant mode: "Uh-huh." "I don't like that." Rose made a nice play in the fourth, and it was evident that with this kind of defense, the game was already in the bag. By the fifth then, we were taking about the industry whose ladder I was climbing. "There's a lot of Jews in the film business, isn't there?" That patented "Uh-huh" again from me. "I don't like that." By the seventh, I was gone.

I tried one last time before he died. What on earth possessed me to choose the movies as the long-sought passage from his soul to mine I still don't know - particularly in the wake of its source as an inspiration for his anti-Semitism. But this, I stubbornly convinced myself, this would be different. Hey, it's a Western. Heck, it's the Western: High Noon. In its tight-lipped, self-made hero who sets out to conform the world, Gramps is going to find the kind of personality he can tolerate, and I too - though on a completely different level - will enjoy the evening.

On the surface, it was another typical meeting between us; words were exchanged with the same economy as Gary Cooper's pattern of speech. But as the film rolled on, the evening became different - different, even, from what I had engineered: two separate agendas in a synchronized silence. As Coop rendezvous'd with destiny, it became evident that there was something new and conpletely mutual between my grandfather and I, that we were both full of the kind of uniquely movie-instilled involvement that dispenses with barriers the way Coop's Marshall Will Kane was - bang!, bang!, bang! - dispensing with the Miller gang. Coop had accomplished in a tension-fraught hour and a half what I, over a period many tension-fraught months, could not.

Weeks later, my thoughts again returned to the film's setting, Hadleyville, as my grandfather's lifeless body was committed to the dust like Will Kane's badge.