Anna Trujillo
Gramps
For the first thirteen years of my life, Grandpa shared a house with Mom and Dad and me. He slept in my room – or maybe I should say I slept in his room. I’d spelled out my name, “Franklin,” in big letters on a sheet of construction paper and taped it to the bedroom door, and the next day Grandpa hung up his own sign, bearing bigger letters in brighter crayon hues, that read “Gramps.” He had the top bunk, and I had the bottom. At night he snored and rolled around so the mattress above me creaked, and I pretended this annoyed me, but really it was nice to wake up in the dark and know Grandpa was right there. It got really dark in that room at night in winter, so dark that I couldn’t see the pattern on my comforter or my hand in front of my face. I wasn’t scared of the dark, of course, but I still appreciated Grandpa’s snores. They helped me get my bearings. Let me know which way was up. That I was awake and not mired in some dream that was as thick and as black as real night. Grandpa was a miracle worker. I don’t say this lightly. He really was somewhat supernatural, though I didn’t realize it until after he was gone. That’s not to say he didn’t have his failings – most grievous among them, according to Mom, who was his daughter, was his unrelenting refusal to eat vegetables or fruits of any sort, though he did have a passion for prunes, which he slurped one after another from his wrinkled fingers whenever a canister of them appeared in the fridge. But the spinach he left untouched on his plate at dinnertime didn’t seem to detract from his ability to predict the weather (“It’s gonna rain tomorrow, Frank,” he said one January evening, even though temperatures had stayed well below zero all week, and sure enough, the next day brought warm winds and a sputtery drizzle) or his keen eyesight (“I’ll say,” he observed one cool June morning, staring out the living room window, “that birch tree there is crawling with ants.”
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