Granddad at about 35 – Circa 1914

In 1955, as a five-year old grandson, I worshipped the ancient ground he walked on.  He was Granddad, born in 1879, in Paso Robles, CA – the first and deepest root in what is now a five-generation California heritage.  He and Granny lived in a court of six, old, Spanish-style, four-room bungalows, on Second Ave., in Arcadia, CA.

The houses were set across from each other in two tidy rows of three, perpendicular to the street with a central walkway between them.  Around the perimeter of the court there were the barriers.  A neatly trimmed three-foot hedge that ran along the sidewalk, parted in the middle to form an entrance.  There were neighboring fences to the north, the forbidden alley to the south, a spotty row of haggard shrubs and small trees to the rear.  But to a troubled child  the hedge was a mountain range of make-believe, separating the magical interior of the courtyard from the frightening world of home.  

At the age of 75, he and 78 year old Granny, were my shelter from the raging family tornado.  Like Dorothy and Toto, I came to them in the midst of the storm. I can still feel the spinning confusion and the vague impression of a cold and gloomy darkness.  The clouds were inside of me, as I approached their front door and entered.  In the dim, musty warmth of their aging living room, as if by magic, the gloom began to dissipate, replaced by a weary peace.  It was Granddad who created the magic.

I do not remember how it happened, the mental images of that day jump without transition from scene to scene.  Time and space between the living room and their bedroom had vanished. I was on his knee, nestled in his arms.  I was out of the storm, away from my world, traveling across the verdant fields within Granddad’s mind. He was the magic.  He was the story.  Inside of him were other times, other places, and other worlds.  The stories he told had calmed my storm, reality had given way to the safety of make – believe.  But in the arms of Granddad the safety was real.

In the land of Granddad, make believe was real, too.  The artifacts of his imagination cluttered the shelves, tabletops, cabinets, and chairs like museum pieces and souvenirs.  They were the tangible relics of inspiration – tin boxes filled with page after page of word pictures, deep in thought and rich with color and music – poems, songs, and short stories.  Real cowboys and Indians, coolies and vaqueros, intertwined with the history of a boy growing up on a California ranch, in the home of a frontier doctor.

The products of Granddad’s ingenuity did not stop with the written word.  Homespun inventions and mechanical marvels made a frequent trek from fantasy to fact.  Hanging on the bedroom wall, was an electric bell, with a hand wound copper coil and an oscillating mercury switch. It was remotely activated by a button made from an old crib spring, flat pieces of scrap metal, and a plastic medicine bottle. In every drawer were hand carved cats, beavers, alligators, dragons and lizards all with tails hewn into letter openers.  There was a dragon that rolled forward on wooden wheels, flapping its wings and snapping its mouth, as you cranked from behind on a flexible cable.  With the push of a medicine bottle button, another dragon would lunge at the unsuspecting operator from its wooden perch atop the living room buffet.  On the floor of the adjoining storage room, another dragon of similar design, recently escaped from his fairyland imagination, was flanked by boxes of spare wheels, and legs and medicine bottles that had migrated in from Granddad’s workshop behind the courtyard.

Something of Granddad must have awakened in me that night, as I nestled in his arms.  I would no longer be enveloped in the fear and gloom of the tempest.  Make-believe built a small sanctuary in my mind and the architect of peace waited patiently at its door.  Of all the monuments to his imagination, peace was the greatest treasure I drew from Granddad, on that soul wrenching day. No storm, including my own, could buffet Granddad’s tranquillity. It towered like a huge monolith over the feeble tragedies of life.  The pervading calm of his soul enveloped me. It wafted over me like the scent of honeysuckle. For me it was the incense of hope and a reason to trust.  It was a light shining on a world beyond the turmoil of home.  In the course of an evening, he had shown me how to see beyond my trials. For even with his eyes closed he could still see beauty with his hands.  The light from within him shone on me, even though he could never see the light.  All the trophies of his creativity had been made in darkness.  His tranquillity had been born of trial.  Fifty years of blindness had opened the windows of his heart and he saw through the darkness with eyes of love.

[In life Granddad never had a chance to see my artwork.  Click here to see what he is looking at now through Heaven’s eyes.]

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