My grandfather believes short people live longer.
“I mean, I have no statistical evidence, I’ve just noticed it’s true,” he said. “I once knew a guy who was about 5’6”. He had that whole Napoleonic complex. If someone working in a store put him on hold on the phone, he would call their manager and have them fired. He wanted his voice to be heard.”
I’m short, and when he says this I wonder if it’s enough to keep me alive until my blood has thinned and I’m bony and haggard.
When my grandfather talks I lose myself in his simpler times. With no education beyond a high school diploma, he speaks with a conviction that I, as a college student, will never possess. The way he talks makes me think of penny candy and prohibition and pastels. He refers to himself as “a regular jerk” and thinks all psychologists are crazy.
When he was a little boy, his grandmother leaned out a window, fell three stories and died. He saw her body lying out on the kitchen table, wrapped in plastic. The next day the window washer came, and when my grandfather saw his white hand outside the window, he screamed and ran away. He thought his grandmother’s ghost was climbing the walls of his apartment. The accident never caused him to have a fear of heights, though; he has told me about how he used to jump from a third-story rooftop onto the top of his father’s convertible. He broke it and his father got mad. Another time he and his cousin ran up a grassy hill next to their house and lit it on fire. The police came to their house to ask who had started the fire, and the two boys hid under my grandfather’s bed. The way his eyes flicker when he smiles makes me think of him still as that ill-behaved little boy.
I am my grandfather’s favorite. He used to drive me to piano lessons every Thursday and on the way home, he would buy me one ice cream, or two if I promised not to tell anyone about it. I used to share my sprinkles with him. When my parents yelled at me, he would stand behind them and wink at me. He is always on my side.
Sometimes on Jewish holidays, we go to my grandparents’ temple in western Massachusetts. The temple’s once proud and sizeable congregation is literally dying, aging every year. No one under sixty years old belongs, and no one new ever joins. Light are scattered along the wall next to plaques that display the names of congregants who have died. There are more lights every year, and each Yom Kippur I look around and see fewer faces awaiting the setting sun.
My grandfather is a leader at this temple. Despite the floundering conditions of the place, it makes me proud to see him standing up at the altar, making announcements about Bingo night and chanting from the Torah. There is something glorious about him; he is tall and wears his weathered skin gracefully. The congregants are noble, stoic heroes, bearing the burden of a quiet oppression that is different but still just as frightening as the obstacles their ancestors had to face. There is dignity in the stocky rabbi with his frayed tallis, chanting and davening to his small group of senior citizens. Their eyes are sad, especially when they look around their holy place and see the wilting crowd.
I think about what it must be like for my grandfather. When I look at him, I don’t see an old man. I see the little boy frightened of ghosts who lit hills on fire, and I see the soldier that walked 30 miles a day with maps and guns and boots on his shoulders. I see the young man that has only ever loved one woman, my grandmother, and I think about his face as he read her letters when he was stationed in Germany. These snippets of his life are all I have, clipped from observations and the stories he chooses to share.
There are moments sometimes when I feel overwhelmed with gratefulness for the ally I have had for the past 19 years. I love my grandfather for the way he cuts tomatoes, the green baseball caps he wears high up on his head and the way he throws a baseball. He sleeps a lot, but when he’s awake, he smiles. There will come a time when I will never see that tired beam again. My grandfather is tall, and if his theory about short people is true, he hasn’t got much time left. That is the thing that scares me the most.
