As I lay in bed, Quick Draw McGraw stares down at me, pistol at the ready, from his spot tacked high upon the 1960’s style wood panel wall.  His ceramic face gives no tells, no indication if I’m going to have to draw or just stare at his crooked smile.  He is joined in his gaze by some other Hanna-Barbera characters, along with some model airplanes and a life-sized outline of me that I colored in kindergarten.  I am 11 years old and Pa is reading me Summer of the Monkeys, by Wilson Rawls.  It’s the kind of book every kid should get the opportunity to hear before they get too old and lose their engrained sense of adventure.  My Grandpa would have been in his mid to late 50’s at this time and when he got tired of sitting and reading he would lay down next to me on my twin sized bed and hold the book above us so that we could both see the words.  It dawns on my now, having experienced similar situations, that this is not the most comfortable way to read a book.

As the lightning struck a mere 30 feet outside the car door, I think I became the living embodiment of the phrase, “jumping out of one’s skin”.  The sound shook the Volkswagen Bug my Pa was driving enough to make me feel as though I had momentarily risen above him from the passenger’s seat.  I was about 13 years old and Pa and I were on a leisurely ride down the old gravel road that surrounded my Grandparent’s home in Hulbert, Oklahoma.  Looking back on it now, I don’t remember my Pa being scared.  Maybe he was and he hid it for my benefit, but I do know that we had some words about lightning and how it worked.  Calming words to help you think about nature rather than leaving you in fear of the possibility of lightning striking twice.

I was, and still am, not real great with our eight legged friends, so when Pa stopped the car and got out as the massive tarantula crossed the road in front of us, I just held back a bit.  I still got out of the car.  I was tough, or I felt like I needed to act like I was.  He walked up to that creeping, hairy monster and let it crawl right up his arm.  This wasn’t a trained or domesticated pet! This was a wild animal walking the hills of eastern Oklahoma!  But he did it anyway and took the opportunity to tell me about the animal and relate his past experiences with them.  He never acted as though he was going to throw it on me or any of the types of things you see on YouTube.  He simply treated the animal and me with respect.  This did not cure me of a fear of spiders, not in the least, but it did teach me a healthy amount of curiosity.

Pa’s prized possession was his Volkswagen Bug.  I can’t remember a time in my life when he didn’t own it, and I’m 39 years old.  He taught my sister, cousin and I to drive a stick in that wonder of German engineering.  As the gears would grind and the car would lurch forward, you could see the displeasure purse his lips.  He wouldn’t stop and we weren’t allowed to give up.  That Bug was getting down that gravel road one stagger at a time, because 25 years ago, knowing how to drive a standard was still an important thing and spending time with your grandkids was the most important thing of all.

Pa passed away about a week ago.

Pa was not a saint and I don’t believe he would have wanted me to portray him as such.  He was a recovering alcoholic (the vast majority of my life he was collecting his chips) with a mean streak.  That only serves to emphasize that he was one thing above all, a human being.

From sitting around the house in his robe watching endless hours of golf to supervising as you lit the fire place, he was an amazing man.  Some of his favorite stories about himself that didn’t involve his grandkids (most did) were about his time as a young man.  Many of these stories would end with the phrase, “no, not Joe, he’s not white.” He was, of course, but the color of his skin never seemed to be a factor in his life.  One of the things Pa was so proud of was the fact that he could make friends and fit in anywhere.  It wasn’t an effort that he had to try and fit in, not something that had to be done consciously.   He just genuinely liked everyone and was more than willing to let you know about it.

I have read the philosophy of people like Aristotle and Jean Paul Sartre, biographies as diverse as Jackie Chan and Martin Luther King Jr, but no matter what there is some part of me that will always go back to the teachings of Joe Scrivner.  It will always be a part of me.

I spoke to him a couple of times before he died.  It was a hard concept for me to deal with that the man that had been so influential in my life was, very soon, not going to be positively influencing the lives of others.  On one occasion, he happily informed me that he had made sure his Bug was well taken care of and in the right hands.  On another, we took a walk down to the creek by his house, as we had many times throughout my life and when my son was off attempting to skip rocks across the water, as I remember doing myself, he looked at me and said, “Son, I’ve had a good life and I am ready to go.”  At the time, it just seemed like a soothing and wise thing that he would normally say and I only had a slight reaction to it.  Writing it now has brought me to tears.  Not tears of sorrow so much as tears of remembrance and tears of hope that I might be able to walk in his footsteps.  One day to look sincerely into the eyes of the people I love and say that this life was wonderful and I hope I have set you too on a path of discovering it’s wonder.

I have a tattoo of Aristotle that I recently got on my forearm that I had imagined was in honor of my being Greek to some extent, but I know now, realistically and retrospectively it is a tribute to the man that taught me the love of books, importance of empathy and need for critical thinking.

Thank you Pa.