My grandfather’s given name was Lewis, but everyone called him Tinker. When I was young, he was a tinkerer, a trader, a man who always liked to have some plan hatching or project going. He slowed down a lot as he aged, like everyone does I suppose. For the past few years, he mostly sat in his recliner and sucked on hard candy.
He left school after 8th grade, and married my grandmother when he was 21. They had ten children together: three girls (one stillborn), and seven boys. Whether it was his idea or hers I don’t know, but they named them all with names beginning with “D”. He saw three of those children buried. He was a very outdoorsy kind of guy–a fisherman, clamdigger, and seafood shucker by profession, and an avid hunter. His favorite kind of hunting was bow hunting. I think he liked the quiet of it, the evening of the odds between you and the animal.
Although he was always incredibly poor, when I was in fourth or fifth grade he managed to buy a couple of hundred acres and build a house. The land supported him later, after fishing stopped being anywhere close to profitable. He sold granite from the land, sold bits of the land. He loved walking the land, hunting the land, owning the land he could see from his kitchen window. Some of my favorite memories of my childhood are on his boat, or at the dock where his boat was. I felt shark skin, learned how to keep my balance, smelled the disgusting chum one uses for bait. I got sunburned and loved this man, whose accent I could barely understand, who was ornery until someone cracked a joke and he grinned a gummy grin, who was one of the few adults in the world that could tolerate my brother.
At night, he played cards with us around his kitchen table, smoking cigarette after cigarette after cigarette in a never-ending cloud, until he fell asleep in his chair. He was an early riser, smoking several more cigarettes over his morning coffee while he watched the sun rise through his window.
He was very respectful of book learning, although he didn’t choose to pursue it in his own life, and always seemed to me to be a little intimidated of what Jon and I did. Things seem harder when you’re not the one doing them, I guess. I saw less and less of him after we moved from Maine, but I really enjoyed talking with him when we visited. He’d ask after our jobs, and what it was like living so far away, and was it very different from Maine, and what was the price of fish “down there”. (California was also “down there”, by the way. He was stunned to learn the price of lobster here–we ate lobster because we were so poor, when I was a child, and sometimes got a little tired of it.)
As he got older, instead of actually hunting the deer, he’d ride his 4-wheeler down to the hunting spots and sit for hours, gun in his lap, watching them. In the past few years, his short-term memory started to seriously fail him. He would go downstairs, sit on his 4-wheeler in the driveway for a few minutes, and then come back into the house talking about the beautiful deer he’d been watching.
He quit smoking on his doctor’s advice, finally, and then couldn’t remember he’d quit.
He died today in his house. He was 73.
A man, a woman, their son, and a camera.