Apples and eyes

My grandpa "Skipper" Brown died of leukemia when I was eleven years old. I don't remember the date, or even the month, just that it was the summer before sixth grade. I do remember being there at the hospital the day he died, and I remember singing at his funeral.

I don't remember crying much. I knew that he had been very sick for a long time; I knew I would never see him again; I asked some theological questions about heaven. I wasn't kidding myself. I knew what death meant. But he'd been really sick, and I also knew that he was better off not being sick anymore. He is the only grandparent I've lost, thus far.

That will be fifteen years ago this summer. And I missed him terribly for the first year or so, but kids are resilient, and as much as I loved the man, his death didn't leave a huge, miserable, gaping hole as much as a sense of "what might have been".

Don't worry, this won't be too melancholy.

In the last couple of years, give or take, I have found myself missing my grandpa again. I wonder if he'd be proud of me. He was a gunner in the Marine Corps, too, and later (in the Navy) in Vietnam. We could have compared aircrew stories. I've never been bothered by missing out on learning how to play golf, or going to feed the ducks, or the cabin in New Mexico. I have such good memories. But the sense of "what might have been" has been growing lately.

I discovered a reason tonight.

I was my grandfather's uncontested favorite. He loved little girls, and, though there are two granddaughters on that side, he and my grandmother (and the rest of the family, for that matter) didn't get to see my cousins very much. So I got to be the focus of all that abundance of affection.

And man, what an abundance. Grandpa Skipper was the one person, throughout my childhood, who I knew loved me without condition or expectation. He was the one person who thought I was perfect, just by being me.

Don't get me wrong: I have always known that my parents, and the rest of my family, love me unconditionally. They have done more for me than I can ever repay, they have supported me in everything good I have ever done, and I can't tell them enough how much I love them. But my parents will understand what I am trying to say. They knew Skipper better than I did, and goodness knows they understood what our relationship was.

I was my Grandpa's little princess. He used to hoist me onto his lap after I had taken a bath and blow my hair dry. He would sit there brushing it long after it was necessary. He and my grandma used to buy Travis's and my Easter outfits, too. I was a notorious tomboy--but you should see some of these dresses. Nothing was too girly, too frilly, or too fluffy. Nothing, in short, was too princess-like. And I would twirl like a dancer in those dresses whenever he brought out the Polaroid.

When my grandparents took me to visit Albuquerque at age 5, he went to the Circle K every morning to get me hot cocoa. And it had to be "too chocolatey." We watched The Wizard of Oz together whenever our family went to visit them in Statesboro ("Statesdonkey" was his nickname for their Georgia town). He was teaching me how to golf: he was a champion golfer. He even had a set of clubs cut down for my eight-year-old frame.

Childhood in the Booth household was sort of no-nonsense. We had all the normal chores, we played sports, we were expected to make good grades. It was a good, wholesome, fun, wonderful life. But visits to Grandma and Grandpa Skipper's house were like stealing into wonderland for a moment.

I'm glad I had that kind of love in my life. I had no idea how important it was then, and the realization of how rare it is now makes me wish he were still around. He was the one person who, for eleven years, said "You are lovely and perfect" no matter what.

I know I'm made, to some extent, of the expectations of the people I respect. Once, there was a love in my life that had no expectation of me other than that I be exactly who I was. I miss him. I hope I'm making him proud. But I know that, if I ever asked him, he would grin and tell me that I would never need to ask.