“Now you see here?” He asked. This was last year. I just flashed back. But you’re with me, right? I’m sorry. All my English teachers tell me to assume the audience is smarter than me. And actually, I don’t really think I’m all that smart to begin with, so I don’t have to do much assuming. Anyway, this is a flashback to last year and the flashback starts with him saying “now you see here?” Oh, also: the flashback starts with him pointing at some large husk of corn. To my grandpa, corn husks all look different. But to me, a cornhusk is a cornhusk. “Yeah, I see.” I said. This, of course, was a lie. I mean, I saw what he was pointing at. But it just looked like he was pointing at a random part of the husk. “Well good. That’s how you can tell when they’re ready. You just look right here. Now—” he looked around for another husk. “—Ah! Here! This one here isn’t ready at all.” When he spoke, he had the thickest Southern drawl. It almost seemed fake. Like, you know, when you make fun of people from the Old South. Like if you have to make fun of some old backward racist, you might say something in that voice. But grandpa wasn’t a racist. He just had that annoying voice. I suppose it’s only annoying to me because I associate it with racism. And corn. And him. “Grandpa,” I said. “Can we, like, go inside?” Grandpa shook his head. “You’re such a city boy. Just like your mother.” Grandpa seemed to always like to let me know that he didn’t like my mother. “Only,” he added, seemingly out of spite, “that she isn’t a boy.” I’m not sure why grandpa doesn’t like my mother. Probably because she is one of those women who do things with her life other than have kids and cook food, and that frightens grandpa. I’m not saying grandpa is some sort of bad misogynist or whatever, that’s just his way of thinking. In his day, that was what happened and no one strayed from that. You can’t really blame the guy at all. It’s like, I read in the news, they found this 70 year old guy that was a soldier at a Nazi concentration camp when he was eighteen. They arrested the guy. Sent him to jail. Now, I’m not saying Nazism is good or anything like that. I hate it. But, the guy was doing what he was told. It’s not like he had much of a choice. Eighteen years old, forced into the army, brainwashed by his leaders to think he was doing something good. And now he’s seventy and they’re going to throw him in jail? He won’t last a day there. It’s a shame, really. All this witch-hunt style shit. Finally, I convinced grandpa to go inside. His house is pretty small for how big the yard is. I opened up the fridge and there were all these root beers. I mean, tons of them. Grandpa never drank any real beer. Said it slowed him down. And I can see that. Although, his son sure does throw them back. I’ve seen my dad down a six pack in like twelve minutes or some shit. Fucking crazy. I hope this swearing isn’t offending you. My English teachers always say don’t swear because it’s tacky and vulgar and it can offend your readers and cheapen your writing. Nuts to that. I want to use every word we got, you know? The swear words are good for emphasis. Some stuff is just plain shitty. And sometimes, some stuff is fucking shitty. It all depends, I guess. But I don’t want to offend you. Sorry if I did, I guess. Anyway. I grabbed a root beer and started drinking it. Grandpa started talking about how it was a special kind of root beer. He said they started making it back during prohibition when you couldn’t make any sort of beer except root beer. And he said it was the best kind of root beer on the market. I didn’t really care because, to me, it tasted like root beer. Nothing more, nothing less. But grandpa, he had that way of finding the difference in everything and exploiting it. Comparing it. Just like those damn corn husks. And my mom. Anyway, I guess the point is I just sat there with that root beer, listening to him going on and on about some president or something. And I just know I’m going to go back there and drink a lot more root beer and have to put up with all his blathering. And I guess what I’m really afraid of is my own sense of relief when he dies. |