French was the language of my childhood. My parents and grandparents spoke the French-Canadian version of French, which is somewhat different from French French. Take for example, the word for vomit. No really, there’s a story behind my choice of that particular example (of course there is). When I was five years old I had to spend the night in the local hospital to have my tonsils removed. It was the first time I’d spent a night away from home and it was very scary. I had a dream that night that I vomited all over myself in my hospital bed. I woke up, thinking there was vomit everywhere. But I didn’t know the English word for “vomit,” only the weird French-Canadian one, so I began to scream, “Je renweille! Je renweille!” (The real French phrase would have been “Je vomite.” MY word is so NOT a French word that I don’t even know how to spell it and can’t even check a French-English dictionary, but I pronounced it “RANH-WAY-EH.”). The nurse of course had NO idea what I was screaming, which made her agitated, which made me more scared. When I finally looked around and saw no vomit, I calmed down.
I understood every single thing my grandfather ever spoke to me in French. There’s something about Grandfather French that lends itself easily to translation.
Pepere loved to play cards. Oh, how he loved to play cards. When he sat at the kitchen table to play he wore a green-tinted sun visor (to keep the light’s glare off the cards?) and little garters to keep his long sleeves at elbow length. His favorite game was pinochle but that was so complicated for children to play that when he played cards with my cousin Ronnie and I, we played Cribbage. He made his own Cribbage boards in the basement. Every Sunday night my aunts and uncles would gather around my grandfather’s table and they would play marathon games of cards, my grandmother sitting staunchly aside, Uncle Norm every so often lending her a glance at his hand.
My grandfather allowed me to make his cigarettes with a little machine that had the word "Laredo" stamped across the front. He bought me ice cream on a stick. We walked to the neighborhood store and he bought 2 FudgeSicles or 2 Ice Milks and we sat in the backyard on the wooden bench that he’d made. He always did the same thing with his wrapper. When his ice cream was finished, he’d insert the stick in the paper and twist the wrapper tightly around the stick. It was the way it should be done, so I did it that way too.
I was 11 years old and in the sixth grade when he died on a beautiful June day. My tender age and my intense love for him probably contributed to its remaining the most sharply painful experience of my life. I don’t know how else to explain it. My father’s death surely was the greatest loss, but the first cut is the deepest I suppose and so my grandfather’s death was the cruelest. I was inconsolable. Walking out of Saint Agatha’s Church on the day of his funeral I remember sobbing from such a deep place within me, I couldn’t catch my breath.
A few days later, back in school, my sixth grade class was assembled on the steps of the auditorium stage to practice singing our songs for the end-of-the-year concert. I remember only that we were singing a song about a man flying an airplane in the clouds. Something about the man or the music or the moment reminded me of my Pepere and I began to cry again. My teacher didn’t know what was wrong. She pulled me out of the row and asked. Through my sobs I barely managed to say the words, “My grandfather died.” She walked me to the Nurse’s office. The Nurse was told why I was crying. She put her arm around me, led me to a cot and allowed me to lie down and rest. I fell asleep and dreamed of clouds and of men flying.
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