God's Perfect Sunday

I can't explain it any other way, but the air today felt like Granny's house.

Not the house my sisters remember, but her big house, the one on the lake that always smelled delicious, because there was always bacon.

[I wrote this whole thing earlier today, and only as I type it, tonight, do I remember that we went there on Sundays, after church. She lived right down the road from church, and always had bacon. I can't believe I had forgotten that.]

Anyways, it's the house where Michael and I used to play, and Ben was there too, but he didn't talk yet. And on holidays, Joey would play with Michael and me in the basement, at the bar. The bar used only for storing boxes that had no other place to live. The bar that was the perfect place for us kids to play when we tired of playing outside, or it was too cold. We really didn't know what the bar even was, just that our houses didn't have one, and that it made us feel like grown ups. The bar we couldn't even reach.

But when it was warm, we would mainly be outside, in the back at the lake, or in the front pushing Ben in the stroller while we waited for Mom to come get us.

And we weren't allowed to drink pop, but we never got in trouble for drinking Cream Soda at Granny's house.

We used to have Thanksgiving at Granny's, too, with cranberry sauce still in the shape of the can.

When I was even younger, just barely old enough to remember, Grandpa was still alive. He would hardly ever leave his chair, but he called me "toughy," and he'd always ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be like him, so the answer was always, "a pipe fitter!" even though I had no idea what that was.

He soon died, which to me wasn't really that sad. After all, I was a young girl who believed in Heaven, and I knew three things to be true: 1) Grandpa was an old man, 2) old men die, and 3) he will never not be proud of me.

Someone I recently met, who has both a father and a son, opened up about his childhood home, where his father was not a very good one. His relationship with his father still exists, however broken it may be, and when he himself became a father, he presented this as an opportunity for his dad to be a good grandfather, a grandfather that grandson would never suspect to be anything different.

As I've grown up, I've learned that my great-Grandpa, the pipe-fitter, may not have been the type of father that I would expect. This may lead you to think my trust has been altered, because I always looked up to him, and he might not have been such a good guy. On the contrary, it actually comforts me that when I knew him, which of course, was at the end of his life, he never let me see the more destructive parts of him, if they even still existed within him at that point in his life. Maybe I was lucky enough to know him at his finest hours.

I definitely knew him to be tough and a bit intimidating, but without this, the nickname "toughy" might not have meant a thing. I knew him to be an old man, which he was, who loved my Granny, which he did, and I knew that he would never not be proud of me, which he won't.

And today, on this perfect Sunday afternoon, I sit on a lake that is not my Granny's, but feels an awfully lot like it, and as I think about my Grandpa, who I hardly knew at all, I think he must be talking to me. And I know he would be proud of me, if for no other reason, than that I am in the Navy. I never knew that he was in the Navy until I was. And while I am not a pipe fitter, nor do I think I ever will become one, I did visit his beloved union hall once. My great-Uncle Jimmy (Grandpa's son) took me and Ben to the local 219 union school and taught us how to weld for a day. At the end of the day, I was frustrated and my eyes were exhausted from focusing so hard, and Uncle Jimmy came to check on my progress, expressing that I was a natural. Uncle Jimmy is a gruff man who very much reminds me of my Grandpa, and who I greatly admire, and his approval of me when I was 19 or 20 took me right back to being two or three years old, spinning in my dress after church at Granny's house, getting dizzy, and falling down, and getting back up with a laugh as Grandpa called me toughy.

And I think today is God's perfect Sunday, exactly as He intended it. The air feels like paradise, the sun is shining just brightly enough, the sky perfectly blue, and the park is full of families, couples, and some (like me) enjoying it solo. Somehow the lake doesn't smell bad, and there are kids throwing stones, while others are hitting each other with pool noodles as they shriek gleefully, and dads yell, "stop having so much fun!" while they make dinner on the grill. And there's a party at the pavilion behind me, and I hope the people attending are thoroughly enjoying the day instead of thinking about all the things they have to get ready for the week ahead. And one kid on the shore has a little remote-controlled motorboat, which must have really been the reason I thought of Granny's lake, because one of the boys, either Michael or Joey, had one of those at some point.

I frequently wish there was a room full of filing cabinets inside my brain, containing the manuscript of my life and my thoughts, this way I could simply file away the things that have hurt me (which I spend far too much time thinking about) and instead, pull out happy files on days like these, instead of having to wait for the perfect temperature and scent in the air, and a boy with a toy boat to remind me that I do still remember my Grandpa, who surely is proud of me.