JULY 9, 2023 – (Cont.) Not long after that, Gaga and I agreed on the next cleanup target: the dining room, which Grandpa had long ago commandeered as his evening office. Back in those days, no one—not even UB or Mother when she visited—questioned what it was that Grandpa was doing in there every evening when he wasn’t otherwise pre-occupied with a meeting at the Masonic Lodge around the corner or a council meeting at the borough hall diagonally across from the Holman block.
The most anyone could get out of Grandpa about his “homework” was, “Hhh, it’s paprwrk, paprwrk” (or alternative, “txes, txes”[1]). There he sat at his oversized desk—formerly the mahogany dining room table—covered with stacks upon stacks of papers, accounting books, office supplies and a big adding machine. The chaos wasn’t confined to the table, of course. It had propagated onto the seat of every chair in the room, then all over the floor and finally, onto the tops of the buffets and side tables. Under the light of a high-intensity lamp, Grandpa would slave away at . . . well, who could know?
Every so often, the adding machine sprang to life—lots of button-pushing followed by the skrshrump! sound produced by the “Total” button. Seeing Grandpa working away in there after a long workday always made me feel lazy. There sat the very model of the American work ethic, the kind of dedication that was required to build, grow and sustain a successful business. While Gaga, UB and I relaxed, watched TV, played Scrabble, or read books, there sat Grandpa, a good two decades past traditional retirement age, working to keep the rest of us fed, clothed, sheltered, and, in my case, educated.
Closer observation over time, however, changed my perspective about Grandpa’s hard-work-sacrifice for the family’s benefit. On my trips between the TV room and the pantry for snacks, I noticed that eventually Grandpa’s chin would bury itself in his chest. Inevitably, his cumulative nap time exceeded the total duration of his actual work time.
Once Gaga gave me the green light to “straighten things out in the dining room,” I stole into Grandpa’s domain to identify a starting point. As I sifted through the jumble of “paprwrk, paprwrk,” I saw it as, “make-wrk.” There were the massive quantities of accounting paper full of erasure holes—but I also found some mislaid treasures in the chaos—a twenty-dollar bill here, a U.S. Savings Bond there.
I soon found myself overwhelmed, mostly by the realization that quite likely Grandpa himself didn’t know what he was doing all evening long—every evening. If he was a monologue machine, a driver totally oblivious to all other vehicles on the road (including those with blaring horns) and excruciatingly slow and detailed in describing every phase of his three-quarter-century-long civic and business careers, Grandpa had never struck me as being senile. Every day he exhibited brilliance and complete command of his faculties. But here was evidence of something quite to the contrary. It was only later that I’d see much of his behavior through the prism of mental disorders that seemed to afflict . . . but I’m getting ahead of myself. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] Which, now that I think about it, might help explain my family’s earnest distrust and dislike of government, and specifically, taxes. No one had a clue what Grandpa was doing with all that “paprwrk” or what he really meant by “txes, txes.” They simply felt sorry for him, a man well in his 80s having to “deal with” all that “paprwrk” and “txes,” that government at all levels had apparently imposed on the enterprise at which he worked so hard day in and day out.
