I have been busy trying to stay sane and to not stay busy. I’ve failed miserably at both.

I haven’t heard from my friend the Whyzeman in a few days - I fear the worst with his current family drama. I remember as kids he’d tell me that his grandma would call him from down the street, he’d come running, and she would tell him to go in the kitchen and bring her a glass of water. I would understandably be upset and can only imagine that frustration of a young man in the 80’s trying to save the world from the Decepticons and C.O.B.R.A. (Or go-bots, if you were Ghetto like me and your mom bought you dollar-store transformers. I had to school her with a quickness.)

That made me remember my own situation with my grandpa that died in 1987. He bought this computer that cost thousands and thousands of dollars back then. It was a TRS-80 Model 4 Microcomputer, from good ol’ Tandy. (Tandicapped? Definitely. By today’s standards it was a 100lb calculator) I would ask could I play with the computer. He would reply, somewhat annoyed, that I could, but only if I asked if I could “Work with the computer.” I would do that, boot the thing up off a 5.25” disk, and enter any pre-1982 date so it would boot up properly. I could run the ‘BASIC’ command and start basic, and somehow magically print out stuff, but only if I included the command line statements, like 10 PRINT and then ended it. Dad could never figure that out. IT DIDN’T HAVE A WORD PROCESSOR PROGRAM, OKAY. NOW I UNDERSTAND, 19 YEARS LATER.

Anyway, I got tired of asking to ‘work with the pc’. I didn’t have extended cable, so I had to watch MTV and Nickelodeon at my grandparents’ house because I only had channels 1-13 like a good cheapskate. So when the MTV top 20 countdown would end, with Bon Jovi’s ‘living on a prayer’ inevitably winning #1 as usual, I would leave their living room and head down the hall toward the computer room. Now at the end of this short hallway, the right turn was into grandpa’s bedroom, with him in it. He was a severe arthritic and was bedridden. Smart as a whip, a professional engineer even. But cripply and withered and deformed. Looking back, maybe it depressed me on some subconscious level to see him like that. So I would belly-crawl to the left, into the computer room, without him seeing me. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes I would hear that “HEYYYYY BABBBYYY” call, which meant I had been discovered. I would go in there and lay with him in his bed and watch tv and then after the obligatory time frame, would ask the inevitable question about working with the computer. To a fat kid who was aspiring to be a hacker, convenience was the more important issue in this case.

And now, to look back on it, I would give my life up to have just an hour or two at my grandpa’s bedside. I would tell him about school, how I didn’t relate well to my parents during my teenage years and how I was depressed for so long. I would tell him how bad I suck at math and could never have been a great engineer like him. I would tell him that after he died that December I sneaked into the cemetery every afternoon after it closed and cried at his grave. I would sneak in and lay by his grave, choking on my tears and snot and sobbing, beating the tomb stone until my knuckles ached for days afterward. Once, I cried myself to sleep and the caretaker woke me up and told me he had been watching me for days and told me it was time to go home.

I would tell him how much I missed him growing up, how much I needed him and how I had become a musician at heart. I would show him how far I’ve come because of his Trash-80 Model 4 computer, and I would show him my wife and three wonderful kids. I would die in peace to have a weak embrace from those deformed, arthritic hands just one more time. To see him in his pj’s, working notes out that were indecipherable because his handwriting and coordination had deteriorated so bad. To see him studying his bible intently, explaining things to me, and to drink ice cold coca cola with him, eating frozen cool whip (his weird favourite treat, which surprisingly tastes great in a cone) and talking about Eucutta, Mississippi, our ancestral pasture grounds.

Enjoy your family while they’re with you, people. The “What if’s” are too frequent in this life.