One of the really strange things about my adolescence is that I never became "too cool" to hang out with my grandparents. My parents I feared being seen with like any normal kid. I remember having a panic attack one night in the tenth grade when my mom decided it would be fun to eat dinner in the food court of the mall. I imagined the place filled with my fellow students, all out on their own doing really grown up stuff and talking to girls and...and there I was eating a slice of Sbarro with mommy and daddy. It was mortifying. I nearly passed out.
But with my grandparents (my mom's parents, just to catch everyone up), it was different. I think it had a lot to do with the fact that around the time I entered high school my grandfather basically decided I was awesome. I have no idea why he came to this conclusion, but from about age fourteen on, I was the heir to the throne.
This wasn't the typical doting of a grandparent. My grandfather was never one to dote. Until I hit my teen years he treated me like the goofy little crybaby that I was. He was never mean or anything like that. He was just a man who made his feelings clear. I was a decent kid, but it’s not like I was about to set the world on fire.
But all of that changed as I got older. Suddenly I was brilliant, clearly smarter than anyone in the family (aside from him, of course). I got a job at the local supermarket, which seemed to gain me several levels in manliness in his eyes. He had owned a grocery store at one point in his life, so I think he had a special respect for it. Truthfully, the supermarket was the only place I could find work when I turned fifteen. But if he saw it as a special bond between the two of us, so be it.
I started becoming a math and science guy about this time too, which my grandfather saw as the wave of the future. While the rest of the family (my parents, my uncle, and my sister) wallowed in silly things like teaching and sales jobs, I was about to make my mark and change the world.
"Hey, Jason, I had an idea the other day," my grandfather said to me one night I was over his house for dinner. "You know how a car engine turns the wheels?"
"Um...yeah, I guess," I said, taking a bite of my third cheeseburger. I loved cheeseburgers--still do, actually--and my grandfather made it a mission in life to make sure I was well supplied at any meal. If I ate less than four in his presence, he took it as a personal insult.
"Yeah, well what if you hooked a belt onto the wheel and fed it back to the motor?"
Oh boy, I knew where this was going. I tried to interject, but my mouth was full of juicy burger goodness.
"You see?" he went on, smiling at his own cleverness. "This way you don't need gas! The car just runs forever!"
"Um, you can't do that," I said, washing down my burger bite with a sip of warm soda.
My grandparents always kept their house stocked with soda just for me, but refused to put it in the refrigerator. It wasn't a space issue. There was always plenty of room in the fridge. They just preferred to keep two or three two liter bottles sitting on the counter by the stove in case I happened by.
"What do you mean you can't do that?" He started getting a little angry now, as was his habit when questioned.
"Well...what you are describing is a perpetual motion machine," I told him, quite sure he had never heard the term before. "It's physically impossible to construct a device that is one hundred percent efficient. It would violate the laws of thermodynamics."
He went quiet for a second, thinking over what I had just explained.
"Yeah, but you could do it," he said, nodding his head in excitement. "You're smart!"
That's how my grandfather saw me. An eager young kid who worked hard, loved his cheeseburgers, and was too smart to be limited by the pesky laws of thermodynamics. I dare say that no one in the world had--or likely will ever have--as much (admittedly misplaced) confidence in me as that man did.
On the other side of the coin, I had to admit I thought my grandfather was pretty damn cool in his own right. He was a giant italian guy who could--and often did--crush walnuts in his fist while playing cards. He was a day trader more than a decade before there were day traders. He had a Wall Street Journal delivered daily, and every day he would pour over the listings on the dining room table with his broker on the phone--a rotary phone, mind you.
And there were romantic--and likely wildly exaggerated--tales of his, shall we say, less than respectable youth. There was something about a fish truck that doubled as a rolling casino on Saturday nights up at the beach--those stories were always halted quickly by my mother just as they were getting started. My grandmother liked to tell me the story of how he came to her rescue when they were in high school and some guy planned to stand her up for the prom--something about just using her to make some other girl jealous. I guess my grandfather was on to the guy and swooped in to fix things, opening the prologue to our family in the process.
So I guess my grandfather and I had a real Ray Liotta / Robert De Niro thing going on...but early in the movie, before Joe Pesci gets killed and all the cocaine stuff. Actually, come to think of it, I guess our relationship eventually did end the same way as in the movie--but that's another story.
Anyway, because of all of this, even in my adolescent too-cool-for-the-world phase I never thought twice about hanging out with my grandparents. We'd go out to eat, I'd come over to help them fix the VCR, and they'd routinely call to check in. It was all very cool. And when they decided to take a four day road trip to sightsee in Canada--the spring of my junior year in high school--I didn't think twice about tagging along.
We hit Montreal and Quebec (roughly about nine hours north of where we lived) and did all the touristy things. I had five years of French under my belt, so I knew enough to read the street signs and annoy the hell out of waiters. My grandparents were thrilled to have me along.
On our last night in Quebec, the concierge at the hotel told us about a special medieval style dinner show that he had tickets to. My eyes lit up at this instantly. I loved--and still love, quite frankly--anything medieval. This, of course, meant we were going. If it was something cool that Jason would enjoy, then sign us up.
My grandfather was also very excited that he was getting a deal on the tickets through the hotel. The man loved getting a bargain. He'd go to three supermarkets a week, just to hit all the sales. And here we got a show, dinner--dinner without forks, but dinner--free refills on soda and wine, and a bus ride to and from for one low price. There was even a two hour shopping excursion after the show where we got to hit all the little shops with coupons from the hotel. How could you go wrong?
(side note, I bet Kim just picked up on where this is going...)
And so, after going up to change, we headed outside to wait for the bus. It was just the three of us and about thirty college kids, out for a Saturday night of fun. We all boarded the bus and began our thirty minute ride to the theater/restaurant. My grandmother--ever the friendly type--happily chatted with the college kids the entire way, much to my grandfather's slight annoyance.
The show was fun...and all in French. I sort of translated for my grandparents for most of it--though inferring a lot more from body language than any mastery of French. Still, I could tell my grandfather was impressed.
Neither of my grandparents drank wine--and I was too young, even by Canadian standards--but, much to my grandfather's delight, I easily drank our ticket price in soda to make up for it. I would imagine the rest of our group enjoyed the show a lot more than we did judging by the frequency the "bottomless" pitchers of wine were being replaced around us. By the time we got back on the bus, the happy college kids were significantly happier than they had been on the trip over. I mean way happier...like, maybe a few of them should keep a bucket on their lap on the ride back just in case happier.
Thinking on his feet, our bus driver made a command decision.
"Ok folks," the driver said over the loud speaker. "I think we are just going to head straight back to the hotel. We'll skip the shopping thing."
A half cheer / half moan of approval slowly made its way up from the back of the bus. My grandfather, however, was decidedly unamused.
"Excuse me," he said, moving up to the front of the bus, "Can we at least have twenty minutes?"
My grandfather had paid for a shopping excursion and--drunk spring breakers be damned--he was getting a shopping excursion.
The poor bus driver turned back with a pleading, hopeful look that quickly withered under my grandfathers unamused stare.
"Well, ah...I guess we could stop for a bit, sir," he said.
Even at the time, I felt for the guy. He clearly had a situation here. I am sure there is a whole course in bus driver school about avoiding just this kind of thing. The last thing this guy needed was a retired couple and their goofy grandson keeping him from getting these kids home before things got out of hand.
And so the bus stopped in old Quebec, amidst a chorus of decidedly unhappy grumbling.
"Ah, we're just going to stop for a few minutes and let these folks have a look around," the bus driver nervously announced.
I did my best to ignore the groaning protests behind me as I followed my grandparents out of the bus.
"So you folks just want to take a quick look around, right?" the driver asked as we stepped out.
"Just give us fifteen minutes," my grandfather said without really looking back.
We took a quick walk around one block, mostly window shopping the little souvenir shops. Despite my grandfather's repeated assurances that we had every right to be out there, the little shopping trip was anything but relaxing. As we came back out to the main street, I caught sight of the bus driver frantically peering through the crowd for us.
"All right folks, are you all set?" he called once he saw us. His question had a panicked yet hopeful quality to it. My grandfather--seemingly having proved his point--let the man out of his misery.
"That's fine, we'll head back," he said as my grandmother and I exchanged relieved looks.
So after our three minute jog around the block, we made our way back to the bus. And by this point, the friendliness of our college friends had completely evaporated.
"Assholes!"
I froze mid-stride in the narrow aisle as I heard the taunt. I felt my grandfather--just a step behind me--tense with rage.
"What did you say?" he asked the crowd in front of me over my shoulder. "Did you say 'assholes'?"
At this point I was fairly certain I would be ending the night in a Canadian hospital, recovering from a stab wound I took defending my elderly grandparents.
Seriously, what was he thinking? I’d spent my entire childhood riding busses and learning the rules. When you are a tall, lanky math geek in thick glasses, you don't make a fuss. If the cool kids scream insults at you, you quickly sit the hell down and pretend you never heard it.
But as I turned to look at my grandfather I saw a brief glimmer of the guy he'd been at my age. In his expression, I saw a guy who was very used to taking control of the situation. A guy who looked as though he'd be very at home behind the wheel of a fish truck. And a guy who was never, ever called an asshole in front of his wife and grandson by some drunk-ass punk sitting in the back of the bus.
"Ah...nothing, sorry." The faceless voice from the back of the bus held a lot less bravado now.
My grandfather just shook his head angrily as we finished making our way back to our seats. It was as if we were letting those kids off the hook rather than narrowly escaping a potentially dangerous situation. It was a strange twist on how things like this normally went in my experience.
We made it back to the hotel without incident, and by the next morning my grandfather was more frustrated that we'd missed out on the shopping trip than anything else. Even though I still believe to this day I came pretty damn close to getting caught in a drunken bus brawl that night, I think I left Canada with a little more respect for my grandfather.
And, for better or worse, I've learned that when someone calls you an asshole on a bus, the last thing you should do is quietly sit down.
