I wanted to write a tribute to my grand father for his birth day. Although he is no longer alive in the usual sense, he lives for me and Masha, his daughter and Jim his son. Marie Weir also holds a torch for him still i think. From what I know Allen was a real charmer. Not that he was a player in the usual sense. If he did 'play the field' it was with diplomacy and tact, more than with real trysting, although I know he was a man in every proper sense.
Allen loved Spain, it's culture history and folklore. I know that the WARD family dates back to the revolutionary war. After that Benjamin Israel and Usul set off down the Ohio river on a barge they made.
Allen had some of that Pioneer spirit also. He met his wife and lifetime companion, Margaret, in Puerto Rico I think. they both decided to become teachers and join the Civil Service. A good career in those days between the wars.
Allen took his degree in Spanish Folklore, although I think he Balked at his final paper. He taught Spanish to American kids living in the Canal Zone of Panama, A U.S. controlled strip of inland waterway that represented the pinnacles of nineteenth century enterprise and twentieth century engineering. The C.Z brats as they call them selves now, were children of the Canals administrators. Most of them attended Balboa High School. They were colonials, and it seems that Allen was one of their most beloved teachers.
When I knew him, Allen read much of the time. He took a trip to the library once a week and brought back a stack of dreadful large print novels. He would also make one trip to see his wife who lived in a group home. We would also drive him out to see her on weekends and holidays. her dementia was such that she dragged him down into depression. But the weekly trips he made seemed to give him strength. He never complained, even when death ate him by inches and he could feel his own mind vanishing. The thing that took him at last was an aneurism in his heart which he carried for two decades. It was the day after we contacted Hospice and had them bring in a hospital bed to replace his own. Just days before, I had stayed to feed him lunch, cajoling him to swallow globs of nutritive homogeneous stew between paragraphs of Mallory's Arthur. Neither one of us seemed to care for Arthur or the stew. We both acknowledged that it was a formality. Just stay alive for this.
A few days later I heard the message from one of my housemates. They didn't know how to tell me, "I think your grandfather just died." I was gone in a minute, leaving a room full of blank puzzled faces to go look on Allen's face for the last time. We cremated him with azaleas from the garden and some silver coins we made.
Silver melts at 1650 degrees, quite a bit higher than the temperature necessary to render human flesh to ash.