My Life, I Love
by: Alexandra Ernst
When I was a kid, I was always fascinated by my paternal grandfather’s tattoo. It was primitive by today’s standards, and the black ink had faded over the years, appearing almost teal blue. My grandfather—I called him Gramps—got it before he had shipped out to “The Big War”—World War II—and I had been told that it was a phrase in Latin. He was a New Yorker and Jewish, so I was a bit confused. I could hardly read the letters and, of course, did not read Latin. I was about eight or nine when I finally asked him what it said. He smiled and touched his upper arm. “Does it hurt?” I asked, instinctively, not completely understanding what a tattoo was.
He laughed and said, “No, Honey, do you want to touch it?”
I nodded and when I touched his arm, I just felt the leathery skin of his still well-defined upper arm. “What does it say?” I asked again, wanting very badly to understand.
“Vita Mea Amo,” he said and grinned. My curiosity peaked; it would still be many years before I got the nerve to ask him what this expression meant, but, once I did, I would ask him over and over again as I loved that certain gleam in his light brown eyes when he got to relive his stories.
Gramps was a decorated veteran, having won five battle stars. He had taken part in the invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. In fact, as the story goes, a friend who was higher up in the military chain—a major—at the last minute moved my grandfather, who had been promoted to captain, from the first wave to the third to land on the Normandy beaches, undoubtedly saving his life.
My vision of my grandfather is not, however, of a war hero but of a compact man with thinning, strawberry blonde hair, and flat feet, who wandered about shirtless, his tattoo visible on skin as fair as my own. He talked very little of his time fighting in the war and the events of the war, yet his participation, like for so many men and women, clearly marked him. He preferred to recount stories from his college basketball career and liked to entertain me and my brother by showing us how his square fingers were bent and mangled from being broken while playing for the Harvard Crimson team.
When I bought my first house, my father presented me with a box of letters, carefully packed away into an old, blue, and brown striped hat box. He had been cleaning the attic and found my grandparents’ wartime correspondence. The letters they wrote to each other over the four years that my grandfather was away fighting in the European theater were sweet and poignant as well as sometimes strictly informational; my grandparents, of course, had no other way to communicate, and during those long, war years, my grandmother was single-handedly raising my father. I read many of the letters out loud to my husband one evening after we first moved into our new home, getting to know my grandparents as they were as young adults, much younger than I was at the time. Almost every letter from my grandfather ended with the same line: “Please send food.”
Most of my memories of my grandfather occur outdoors, in the woods or on a lake in the Adirondack Mountains. He taught me the difference between conifer leaves, pine, spruce, and cedar, placing them in my hand as if it were a cup. He liked to skinny dip on beautiful summer days when no one else was around. Once or twice, during one of our family annual vacations, my brother and I arrived at my grandparents’ private dock to find him swimming alone. My grandmother would emerge from the modern, lake house, laughing with her highly styled grey hair billowing in the breeze. She would call to us in a slightly raspy, yet tender voice to turn our backs so that Gramps could run naked to the outdoor shower.
When I was growing up, my grandfather liked to take long hikes with his friend, Slim, a tall, regal man who outlived him by decades. They went off trail, discovering clearings and marshes as they bushwhacked for miles. Slim had fought in the war as well, but the two men did not meet until years later. Still, they had many private jokes and, often, I would try and decipher their mysterious banter. There was a famous story of them hiking together one day when they were younger and, as evening fell and they still were not home, my grandmother began to get nervous. Finally, there was a phone call. My tipsy grandfather was on the line, asking my grandmother to come pick them up in a bar several towns away.
As he got older, Gramps traded the woods for a slat back lawn chair. He would sit on his deck, cigar in hand, a tumbler of scotch on the table beside him. I would sit next to him, his strong, woody cologne—over time, he doused himself with more and more of it—wafting over me and asked him to tell me the names of the small islands dotting the lake. There was Battleship, Tamarack, and so on. Each island had a story. One day, he announced that there was an unnamed island near his house that he had decided to name after me. I was thrilled, of course, and threw my freckled arms around his neck. “There it is, Alex’s Isle,” he would say joyfully each time I came to visit. He enjoyed the alliteration and must have liked seeing a certain pride register on my face. I was especially pleased as he had already named a mountain after my brother.
Years later, as I was canoeing around the lake with my trim father—he has always been and still is a great paddler—I realized that my island was a peninsula. “Perhaps it used to be an island,” my father offered, “but it is now entirely connected to the mainland.” He paused when he heard me sigh. “Such is nature, Al, the lake is constantly changing.” I was disappointed but remembered how Gramps had liked to point to it from high up on his sunny deck, his hazel eyes covered in dark tinted sunglasses. As he had stopped going out onto the lake in his later years, he could not have known that my island had been transformed.
Gramps was never quite the same after my grandmother’s tragic and untimely death from a brain aneurysm—she was only sixty-three—spending more and more time indoors and becoming somewhat of a recluse. I do remember on the day I graduated from high school that he drove, alone, about an hour or so from where he was living to the ceremony in Central Connecticut. No one knew in advance that he was planning to attend my graduation or that he even knew when it was. He had just begun his battle with colon cancer and, because of the severity of the illness, very rarely left his home.
It was a rainy day so my graduation ceremony, planned for outdoors, had to be moved to the gym. As I lined up on the basketball courts with my classmates—girls in frilly, white dresses and boys in navy blue blazers and khaki pants—I caught a glimpse of my grandfather about an arm’s length away from where I stood. I could see that he was wearing a plaid sport’s jacket and was waving furiously and smiling. He called to me: “Hello, Sweetie!” I reached out to him and was able to briefly grab his outstretched hand as it shot straight out from between the square shoulders of two young men who stood at the front of the crowd. He was frail so his jacket seemed a bit too big for him and his wide framed tortoise shell glasses had slipped down from the bridge of his nose, but his face was absolutely glowing. I beamed at him, surprised, and delighted by his presence, as I headed towards the podium.
After I received my diploma, I looked out into the crowd, but, just like that, my grandfather was gone. As it turned out, my mother, father, brother, and stepmother, all squeezed together at the back of the room, had never even seen him. With the space constraints of a crowded, indoor ceremony, the event had become somewhat of a free-for-all. Truth be told, I realize now, four decades later, that my grandfather’s brief attendance at my graduation was probably one of the most colossal acts of love of my entire life, and a brave act too, for Gramps would soon be in and out of the hospital. His death eighteen months later would come, in fact, less than two years after my grandmother’s. But, on that auspicious day, he had shown up, making sure that I had seen him, that I knew he was there. “Vita Mea Amo,” as Gramps would say: “My life, I love.”
About the Author
Alexandra Ernst is a writer currently living and working in Arlington, Vermont. Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Arcturus, Allium, Oranges & Sardines (Poets & Artists), Step Away Magazine, and All Things Girl. She has recently completed her first novel.