Short Story - While Amongst the Stars

Short Story Tuesdays

The last few years of Grandpa’s life were the first few years of mine. Not literally speaking, as I was already a decade old when he came to live with us in the beach house I had grown up in. Before his arrival my days were spent like any other boy. Eating anything I could get my hands on, playing with toys I’d soon outgrow, sitting in front of the television for hours at a time. But when Grandpa came things changed.

He had arrived one late afternoon with an old suitcase in one hand, a trench coat draped over his other, and a hat atop his head that made him look like a man who was always on the go. Or maybe I had just formed such a preconceived image thanks to my parents and their stories about him. How he had travelled the world many times over, beginning with his tour of duty during World War II. How he had fallen in love with Paris, and in particular, the ancient French art of storytelling, where men calling themselves jongleurs would tell stories in public as a profession. Grandpa, who was poor at literacy but rich in the spoken word had found his true calling, and after many years of earning his stripes as a jongleur among the streets of Paris had set out for one country after another, absorbing local folklore, then masterfully crafting it to his ever-increasing repertoire.

Every now and then the wandering storyteller would find his way back home to the states, and it was during one such occasion while staying at a hotel on a beach in Maine when he met and had an affair with Natalia, one of the cleaning maids. With the wide open world calling out to him, Grandpa couldn’t help but be on his way, having no idea he had planted a seed during his short time on the shores of The Pine Tree State. Only a lifetime later had he received the old letter postmarked Sept. 17 ’53. Some thirty years after Natalia had written it, and nine after her untimely death, when Grandpa had gotten around to visiting his old Parisian friend, who in turn took it from an old dusty book and placed it into his nomadic hands.

He couldn’t read much, but didn’t have to to make out the most important words.

He had a son, which by the date on the envelope meant the boy had since become a man.

With the help of his old friend Grandpa wrote back to the hotel address, hoping there would somehow still be a connection back on that Maine beach. Natalia had been living alone in a one-room bungalow behind the hotel when they had had their brief time together, but so much could have changed over the course of a third of a century. Still he wrote back, evoking such passion with his speech and movements as he dictated to the Parisian. They then sealed it, stamped it, and sent it off, Grandpa once again using the streets of Paris as his stage while waiting for a reply.

Two months later and Grandpa, through pictures and words, met not only his adult son, but grandson and daughter-in-law as well, along with the tragic fact that Natalia had been taken from them by a freak lightning strike right before Richard’s birth. Richard, the boy who had heard grand stories of his grandfather, the jongleur, told by his father Jon, who had been named after the profession of the father he had never met, through stories first told to Natalia. A grandmother Richard had never met. It was all worthy of a tale within itself, and now a new chapter in all their lives was about to begin as Grandpa put down his old suitcase, removed his travelling hat from his head and placed it atop mine. He had slipped his hand into mine before I had realized he had done so, the accent in his introduction having an eclectic sound of being multi-cultural.

With the retrieval of one hand he brought forward the other, the one that had been draped by the trench coat, and with the same level of smooth movement slipped a leatherbound book into my empty extended hand.

I opened the book and found the pages to be blank, a fine-looking pen snugly holstered to the back of the front cover. Without really needing any explanation I looked back up at Grandpa and we shared a smile, the hat and writing journal, both of which I was eager to grow into, his way of sending me forward on my life’s journey.

We invited him into our modest bungalow. It had two extended rooms since the last time he had set foot in it, and he immediately began to recall where he and Grandma Natalia had eaten, slept, watched the sunset. How amazed he was to learn it was still in the family, and saddened that still under the same circumstances. Dad had chosen to be the opposite of his wandering father, fear of the unknown leading him to stay in the same place he had been born, with his lack of ambition, or more accurately, opportunity, causing him to follow in his mother’s footsteps of working for the family who owned the hotel.

Groundskeeper Jon eventually took a liking to someone who reminded him of his own mother, another hotel maid, and thus the strange laws of attraction ensured that the perpetual cycle of poverty would continue on. A disease of humankind that proves to be so hard for those plagued by it to cure themselves of. A social ailment Grandpa himself had tried to rid himself of back when he first left the shores of American soil. But as if it had been destined in our bloodline, as if it had been part of our DNA and somehow projected by an unseen cruel force, the stigma of being a have-not simply could not be shaken.

Being the powerfully dramatic storyteller he was, Grandpa ended this reflection of our place in this world with a tear in his eye, but not before finding my mesmerized gaze and uttering the words…

“And yet we go on. Why?

“Because there’s always the hope for tomorrow.”

From that moment on I was hooked. Forever changed. Story was now my air, and Grandpa, the winds that brought it. Like two new best friends, we were always together. The library; our candy store. The beach; our playground, as we would devour one book after another. I reading them aloud, while Grandpa would oftentimes perform what I had just read. His ability to recite long passages after only hearing it once was astounding, and his talent to enhance the author’s work, awe-inspiring.

Our nights were just as enjoyable if not even greater, laying out on what he would call the front row to the universe. In nothing but a pair of shorts we’d be spread out on the beach looking up at the infinite stars while the countless grains of sand would contour against our bodies. Grandpa said this was the magical place for storytellers, that each granule of sand was a star’s counterpart, and vice versa. And it was indeed in this state of celestial being where I first experienced that true nirvana of creating, the cosmic seeds of inspiration gently massaging my skin as I slowly moved my body through the stars, the tip of my fine-looking French pen sticking out from between my fingertips as I wrote, from my soul, towards the cosmos.

I was like a conductor with that pen swirling through the air, planets, clusters, constellations, all energizing brilliant stories within my mind. It was a beauty I knew could never be surpassed, and I felt forever in debt to the one who had brought me to heaven’s doorstep. My mentor, my best friend, my Grandpa.

For the next seven years we ran, galloped, flew through our galaxy of genius. I was a star pupil in my writing classes, Grandpa always waiting with such excitement for me to return home from school with my latest book report or essay grade. And whenever I’d get published in the school newspaper, whether it was for a short story or anything else, he’d be so elated.

I was even approached by the school principal to write a speech for my high school graduation. At first he wanted it to be read by our class valedictorian, but Grandpa shot that idea down as soon as it was brought up, personally visiting the principal’s office to tell him to his face that there were no ghostwriters in our family.

That class of ’93 ceremony turned out to be one of the most memorable moments of my life