The Brooklyn Bridge has the initials M.H.W. on it - which are my grandfather's initials - but more importantly, stand for Mean High Water.
In Memory of M. Harry Wartur
Recently a Captain named Rob Bellanich stood over the two hulking motors of his boat and told me, with great confidence, “I can fix anything.” I looked at my friend in awe. Because, frankly, I can’t fix anything. I’m a Jewish kid from Connecticut. My core competency is dialing the phone and calling for help. But when I looked at Rob as he rolled up his sleeves and leapt with agility and bravery into the steaming, cramped depths of his boat, I suddenly, and perhaps for the first time, saw my grandfather. “Grandpa,” I thought to myself. “How’d you get to be you?”
I suppose my relationship with Grandpa was always affected by the fact that, if I were to travel back to 1938 to visit with him when he was my age, we would have been as different as can be. He would be a father of two, who had survived the War to End all Wars, supported his family through the Great Depression, and was prepared to survive the trauma brewing in Europe. He’d already been married for eight years, in fact withstanding his family’s disapproval for having married his second cousin. He and his generation didn’t know it at the time, but they were of the mettle to conquer the military world within seven years and the entire economic world ten years later. In terms of personal accomplishment, how could I -- a person brought up eating fruit picked idly from the trees he planted, fed, and bent to reach my hand -- relate to him at all? But even more distancing would be our vocations. Grandpa Harry built things. I just use and enjoy the things he built.
Can I blame my generation for being so spoiled, when we had it so good? Perhaps not. But I should fault myself for being such a stereotypical liberal, for suspiciously labeling those people who build big things as driven by destructive and not creative potentialities. Until that day on Rob’s boat, I considered the men and women who cut roads through fields as married in intent to those who turned sailboats into battleships. Builders all seek domination and control, over nature or over other humans, simple as that. My elitist myopia must have affected my relationship with my grandfather. Yet what I never realized was what it meant to see the world as something raw and wonderful and capable of growth.
To see the world through Grandpa’s eyes! Eyes which I did not inherit and jealously admit were sky blue, the color, I think, of optimism. How did the world look to him? Mountains were not made of imposing and harsh rock, they were chalk to be powdered and sculpted and perforated with iron rails. Steel was not rigid, it ran like reams of silk to be sewn together. Asphalt was not solid under his feet, it was penetrated by jackhammers like the crust of cake is by birthday candles. How malleable the world! How it must have appeared to Grandpa, who saw endless possibilities of such awesome scope.
It took vision like his to build this country, to outlast the depression, to win two world wars. His eyes were of sufficient strength and bravery that they led his body through ten decades. My grandfather was so much a survivor that by the end of his life perhaps his most salient characteristic was simply that he had lived so very long. As he lay on his death bed I studied his eyes with fascination. Almost a century of absorbing light. I looked at his hands. Hands that had served him so very well for almost ninety-three years. I found a scar on his arm, and imagined that it might have traveled with him for sixty years or more. My Grandpa built projects all over the world, bringing back gifts for me from every exposition: boy scout patches from South Africa; black, metallic sand from El Salvador; a flier from the Grateful Dead performance he attended at the Egyptian pyramids. That scar, I thought, has been around longer, and seen more of the world, than ever may I.
How did Grandpa carry, if not epitomize the strengths of his generation, yet avoid so many of the weaknesses of his peers? Republican men of the 50s like him were supposed to accept no opposition! Yet he married his daughter to a communist’s son and supported me constantly even in Ted Kennedy’s office. Men of his time were supposed to prefer sons, yet I was his only grandson and he never made me feel special simply because of my gender. Men of his time were supposed to be authoritative and tough, yet my mother tells us that his presence was so comforting to her that, as a child, when she could not find him, she would rest and find peace in his favorite chair. Men of his time were supposed to be ethnocentric, yet Harry was teaching himself Spanish a year before he died.
If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to read a poem I wrote for Grandpa’s 90th birthday. For the past three years, I’ve kept working on it, trying to make it a proper sonnet. I’m still not quite there. I guess I’ve always assumed that I’d have more time to perfect it and share it with him.
“Look Forward
Enter no tenth decade facing the past
surveying your life’s a family task
created were we by a mingled fate
with the woman you loved from age eight.
Your schooling began during World War One
World War Two threatened your daughter and son
The depression: your roads for the U.S.
were born, and they outlived the Soviets
You built ports, Coco Solo, Panama
to Egypt's Port Said; Damietta
to Acajuita; the Dominicans;
and canals from New Orleans to Brooklyn.
Like us, each N’York bridge wears your initials
proud to make your legacy official”
They don’t build things the way Grandpa did, anymore. They don’t make ‘em like Harry, either.
