Nearly every weekend when I was a kid, my father’s Czechoslovakian parents would pick up my sister and me, and drive us away with them to their house in a nearby town. My grandmother, whom we called Grandlibby, was one of the sweetest and most patient women ever to grace the planet. I suspect most people feel that way about their grandmothers, but this was the same woman who, when pushed, would describe Hitler as a “sad little man who probably didn’t get hugged enough when he was little,” and would say only of Satan, “I’m not a fan.”
My grandfather seemed to view the overwhelming cheerfulness of his wife as some sort of dare, and set out to balance out her effect on the world by being just generally put-out about everything. He was harmless under the gruff demeanor, but we always gave him a wide berth as he stalked through the house, muttering angrily to himself in Czech (probably about how much he wished he had a cane to hit people with). Grandlibby would always smile lovingly at him and patiently humor whatever it was he was pissed off about at the moment, as she quietly shooed us all out of the room until he had time to watch Bonanza and calm down. I’m not sure how much of her superhuman patience was love, and how much was simply self-preservation.
According to family legend, when my great-great-great-aunt was in her thirties, she sat down at the breakfast table and her husband drove a nail through the back of her skull and then buried her in the backyard. I’ve been told this was totally kosher at the time. The backyard burial, that is. Not the nail-through-the-head thing. Nails in the head have always been frowned on, even in Texas. There’s no real proof any of this happened, but my great-great-great-uncle’s alleged deathbed confession to killing his wife (and also to setting his father on fire a few years before that) was considered fact in our family. My grandfather said that after the confession, several members of our family dug up his great-aunt and found the nail still embedded in her skull. Then they buried her again, without informing the police, because this was before CSI: Miami. I’d pointed out that digging up a family member’s corpse just to check for skull holes is almost as bizarre as murdering someone with a nail through the head, but Grampa disagreed and mumbled grumpily about “kids today not understanding family responsibilities.” I sometimes wondered whether my grandmother was that inhumanly good-natured only because she was trying to avoid getting a nail in the head. I doubt it, though. Grampa wasn’t that great with tools.
Deep down he was a good man. You could tell he felt uncomfortable around children, but we didn’t hold it against him, as the feeling was mutual. He’d had a series of strokes in his sixties, which caused him to blink one eye involuntarily, and he became convinced that the women of their church would think he was luridly winking at them, so he began wearing dark-tinted Roy Orbison glasses, which, accompanied by his stoic demeanor, thick old-world Czech accent, and his penchant for wearing undershirts and dark suits, gave him the air of being the head of a Mafia family. Neighbors treated him with a quiet respect, perhaps fearing that he might put a hit out on them, and more than once I heard him referred to as “The Terminator.”
Grampa did everything at his own pace, a speed that my sister and I referred to as “when snails attack.” It was most obvious when he was driving. He was almost legally blind, and the dark glasses were helping no one, certainly not anyone sharing the road with him. He tempered these limitations by driving about thirty miles under the speed limit at all times. My grandparents’ house was only about ten miles from ours, but the ride there would necessitate sandwiches packed for the trip, and several books to keep us occupied. Once, on a particularly slow journey, my sister realized that she needed to go to the bathroom, and I tried to convince her to hold it, but she couldn’t, so Grampa turned toward a gas station. He suddenly swerved, insisting that a cougar had just darted out in front of the car. We had all seen the cougar he was referring to. It was a double-wide mobile home that had been parked by the side of the road for at least twenty years. Lisa and I calmed ourselves in the knowledge that even if Grampa did run into something, at this speed we’d probably just gently bounce off it. We often contemplated leaping out of the car and running the last few blocks to our grandparents’ house, fairly certain that we could make it there in time to try on Grampa’s spare hearing aids before they ever pulled into the driveway and realized we were missing from the backseat.