On a recent trip home to Baltimore for the weekend, I saw my Grandfather three separate times in two days. I got breakfast with him on Saturday morning at the Double T Diner, met him again later that night for a larger dinner with my parents, sister and cousins, and then had him over for brunch at our house the following morning. Three meals, at least ten hours together, within a 48 hour trip.
On the bus ride home, with an open seat next to me and three hours of forced tranquility, I felt uneasy. It was Grandad, and the time we had spent together: It hadn’t felt long enough, or substantial enough. At brunch we had hardly spoken, and he had been surprised when I said I needed to go. “Already? How are you getting back, the bus?” I had been itching to leave, to get back to my own life, but that same feeling was making me feel sick on the ride home. I wouldn’t be back to Baltimore for at least another month, if not more. I started to think morbidly about how many more times I would see him. Fifty? Less than that? How could I possibly make the most of such limited time together?
The story of that bus ride is a product of a much longer story, the story about my Grandad, Louis Meren. As he comes one year closer to breaking 90 years old, I realize that I am in the enviable position of not only having him around but of calling him my friend. As I have aged over the last 26 years, he has largely stayed the same: same glasses, same polos, same stories. He went from being the primary caretaker of my grandmother to being a single man, from living in a suburban house to living in a retirement community condo. He no longer drives himself most places and has almost entirely given up cooking. But beyond that, the Grandad I remember as a five-year-old is largely the same man I spend time with today. The following is my Grandad as I have known him throughout my life.
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Together with my sister, Gillian, and my two cousins, Patrick and Shannon, I spent a ton of time with my grandparents, and Grandad was the facilitator of it all. He ferried us to and from events, took the whole family to dinner, and had us kids over for what seem now like very frequent sleepovers, and we were spoiled through it all. For whatever reason, compared to our time with Grandy, Grandad’s pampering didn’t feel much like special treatment. Sure, he took us to get donuts, bought us toys and books, and let us watch some inappropriate movies, but all of that paled in comparison to the bowls of ice cream and mac and cheese our grandmother gave us. All four of us loved Grandad, but we loved being with Grandy. She was the fun grandparent.
As our true guardian during those days away from our parents, Grandad felt like every bit the disciplinarian. My early memories of him are filled with the phrases he would use to get us to stop doing something. “No one hurts my grandchildren” was what he said when we were fighting, and “no yelling in the backseat” when it was clear we were distracting his driving. “No toilet talk at the dinner table” was another, self-explanatory phrase he used often. Among the four of us, and particularly Patrick and I, Grandad’s words became like a sharp dog whistle, letting us know the fun was over and the lecture was coming. We couldn’t swing from tree branches; couldn’t run across the street, down the stairs or across a linoleum floor. I forget whether these words ever left Grandad’s mouth, but the implication was that we could crack our heads open and die. Fun (even within weekends of pure, sugar-filled bliss) felt hard to come by. Knowing him much better now, I’m sure he said all of this with his gentle kindness, but at the time his voice carried the weight of Zeus. He spoke and we listened.
All of which is to say that Grandad didn’t seem, at the time, like someone I would eventually grow so close to. There is a range of distinct grandparent personalities, and both Grandy and Grandad occupied very different ones, with Grandy the person I felt excited to see when I walked through the door, and Grandad the person I relied on for my meals, some form of entertainment (games, toys, books or movies) and usually a good story or two. As a little kid, both Grandy and Grandad felt very clearly like grandparents; they were guardians our parents let spoil us on occasion. I was used to them providing a lot of treats in my life: birthday meals, first communion suits, random gifts and miscellaneous money. My favorites were all day movie binges and grownup sandwiches like turkey Rachels and cheesesteaks.
Because of Grandy’s immobility (she didn’t drive), it was Grandad who brought us around town to procure what we needed for our weekends at his house. There was a particular strip mall, near their house in Bowie, Maryland, where we could get it all: breakfast at the Dough Roller, movies at the Blockbuster next door, and then a dozen Dunkin Donuts at a nearby gas station. I remember absolutely nothing about whether or not Grandad partook in any of this (did he even order breakfast?) other than his Dunkin Donuts order, which comprised of a dozen plain donuts. Back then those seemed like health foods compared to what we got, and I was never once tempted to try one.
There eventually was a point at which I came to appreciate meals with Grandad and the stories that accompanied them, but in the early days he felt very much like a chaperone for Gillian and I, and sometimes all four of us, as we basked in the joy of a sleepover weekend. My most vivid memories of that time have already been recounted: the stern phrases, morning routines. Outside of that, my main memories as a child with Grandad are when I’m alone. In one, a five or six year-old me wolfs down a Burger King Big Fish sandwich with him looking on, equal parts impressed and worried I might choke on his watch. In the other, I am in the backseat of his grey Taurus sedan, peppering him with questions about Cal Ripken’s career on the Orioles.
Many times during those weekends, Grandad would take us to stores that felt exclusive to grandparents and their grandchildren. We went to one, either a coin store in Laurel or a coin store named Laurel’s, where Grandad would talk shop with the owner and we would wander the aisles, browsing the miscellaneous collectibles and memorabilia on display. I knew it was a special place because I knew about Grandad’s collections, the time he spent in his pajamas (undershirt, pajama pants and black dress socks) poring over volumes of stamps, picking at them with tweezers and writing unintelligible codes underneath each one, and so I took the visits seriously. I also knew it was a special place because he had forced coins into our own lives: silver dollars when we lost a tooth, one dollar Sacajaweas and later presidential coins in our Easter egg hunts. Later, I would get a special gold coin for my high school graduation, something Grandad himself had received from his father, and as the years passed he taught me about his hobby, how coins had bullion values and intrinsic values, how rare certain misprinted stamps were. The collectibles added just one more layer to the myth, to the intrigue of the man. What were the codes? Why did he play so much computer solitaire? And what did his bedroom look like?
The second place Grandad brought us was a used bookstore. It absolutely stunk in that place, smelled overwhelmingly of decaying paper and aging ink, and I spent the whole time looking for books that appeared, to the naked eye, to have never been read. I still remember some of the true gems: Hardy Boys books, spines uncracked and pages a crisp eggshell white, a Clue pick-your-adventure series, an endless supply of Mike Lupica’s sports books. On those trips, there was absolutely no spending limit, no book count. The first few times we went, as I brought my stack of books towards the front, fully intending on discarding a few and making trade offs, Grandad would say “Get them all. And are you sure you don’t need any more?” Cheap, used books were essentially free to him, so important was it that my sister and I continue our obsession with reading. “Twenty books for $12.75,” he would tell us when we got in the car, beaming as if he had robbed the place blind. Back at the house, we would excitedly run into the TV room and spread out our wares in front of Grandy, repeating his mantra: “Twenty books for $12.75! Twenty books for $12.75!” The message was clear: there was no price you could put on reading.
That was largely how our relationship continued throughout elementary school. In the third grade, my family moved to Paris, and so I saw less of my grandparents, but the times they visited were just more concentrated versions of the same, with Grandad buying us gifts and telling us stories about wonderful French foods, and Gillian and I soaking up every minute spent with Grandy. When we came back over the summer, it felt like every minute with them was spent doing whatever we wanted, as if we needed rehabilitation after suffering in France for so long.
When we returned to the US for good, as I was entering the fifth grade, my relationship with Grandad began to cleave itself from my sister’s relationship with him. I was a boy and had the distinct honor of showing interest, whether genuine or feigned, in many of the same things he did: Ravens football, military history, collectibles, gambling. In particular, I began to attend Ravens home games with him, along with Patrick and my Uncle Kevin, and that distinction as his plus one went a long way in shaping the next phase of our relationship. On most Sunday mornings in the fall, he would drive an hour or so to my house to pick me up (passing the stadium in the process), we would take the light rail another 45 minutes to the stadium downtown, and then spend at least three hours at the game. Even when the Ravens were away, there was a good chance he was driving me somewhere to watch it together.
More important than the time spent at the game, Grandad and I would always get an early dinner at The Mount Washington Tavern on the way home. I forget exactly how we first started going there, but I remember my order with crystalline clarity: Caesar salad, an order of buffalo wings drowned in blue cheese, a two crab cake platter. I don’t remember what Grandad ordered, but it’s safe to assume it was a burger, most likely medium rare with Swiss cheese, occasionally with mushrooms and sometimes with provolone. At some point during that first season together, dinner at the tavern became an informal ritual, and I was spending practically my entire Sunday with my grandfather, listening to his stories on the way to the game, shouting myself hoarse at the stadium, and then wheezing through conversation at dinner. There is no question I under-appreciated the treatment, which by any measure was fit for royalty, but at the time it felt like a fair trade off for my spongelike ability to sit there and listen to Grandad’s stories, every once in a while stoking the flames with a nod, a leading question, or a laugh.
If I learned one thing from our time together, it is that Grandad has a hell of a lot of stories. Even accounting for the inevitable repetition that comes with old age and a captive, respectful audience, he has enough stories to have kept me entertained pretty consistently for over twenty years, and even now I’m continuing to hear new ones. He has told me stories about running a grocery store during the Great Depression, about drunken poker games deep in the bowels of an aircraft carrier, bachelor celebrations on the shores of Tokyo, and corporate mismanagement at his lifelong employer, Westinghouse. Grandad remembers enough sports trivia to make me feel like I was there watching alongside him, and he fabricates enough political lore to make me a lifelong cynic. I’ll never forget the feeling of teasing something new out of him, as if I had finally become worthy of something weighty, mature enough to be let in on a secret.
Grandad’s stories have a mid-century sheen to them that I crave. He tells me about football Sundays before the leagues had merged, when he would head over to his neighbor’s place to watch the game (there was only one to watch) in the guy’s attic. He always went over loaded down with food and drinks, which he loves to describe in vague, gargantuan terms. “Grandy would prepare a few dozen veal chop sandwiches and I’d pack up a cooler of beers for the afternoon.” I often wondered how an entire veal chop could reasonably fit on a sandwich (and what about the bone?), and how a group of three or four men required so many to begin with. But in the context of what he told me about those days, how beers cost a nickel, cars could be acquired for a few hundred dollars and bar fights were commonplace, it helped color a world which felt so different from my own. I particularly loved hearing Grandad talk about Friday nights in Wilkes-Barre, soon after he’d married, when he and one of Grandy’s brothers would drive an hour to a nearby town, spend a buck fifty on a lobster and steak dinner, each drink about thirty beers, and drive back home. He spoke so matter-of-factly about the recklessness of those days that his stories actually had positive influences on me. “We didn’t know any better back then,” he’d say about driving under the influence, using ethnic slurs or getting in fights, as if those behaviors were no longer options for me in my own era.
I peppered him with questions about his life that helped me understand who he was, and why he did the things he did. He spoke of a childhood Christmas when his one gift was a beautiful wooden truck. Soon after he got it, somebody backed over the truck in his driveway, and he spent the year toyless. “Grandy and I decided we’d buy your mom and Aunt Eileen, and even you grandchildren, pretty much whatever you wanted, since we had the money to do so,” he’d said in closing, as though he had resolved to spoil the following generations of Merens that very day, as a crying five year-old. That my own Christmases at their house had been filled with gift piles stacked high with remote controlled cars, video games, action figures and Ravens gear made a lot more sense. I was reaping the benefits of a lean childhood sixty years earlier.
To his credit, Grandad never once held me to account for the bountiful life I was having at his expense. I couldn’t comprehend his college experience, the years spent living in an old woman’s frigid Detroit basement, buying discounted steaks from an Italian restaurant and grinding through a degree in engineering. That certainly didn’t jive with my own college education, in which weekends were spent drinking Busch Lights and binge-eating McDonalds and Taco Bell. If he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, a child of uneducated Italian immigrants, the son of a coal miner killed on the job, I was doing the opposite, taking a world of privilege and eroding my potential with each A- grade, leadership position avoided and summer spent traveling, playing video games and earning zero income. If he ever felt like I was the undeserving, spoiled brat that I must have seemed, he never showed it, instead constantly reinforcing my own merit in his subdued style. “Just keep working hard,” he’d say. “Work” to me felt like the wrong word in the context of what he’d done, but I kept my mouth shut. In one particularly clumsy attempt to earn his respect I suggested I was curious about joining the military. “I don’t see any reason why you’d want to do that,” Grandad had said in response. We left it at that.
From Grandad’s perspective, he saw me mature through the things I quizzed him about. In the early days we spoke a lot about the old Colts heroes he loved, and I firmly believed Johnny Unitas to be the world’s greatest quarterback. I wanted to know everything about his time in the Navy, and was fascinated by all of the mundane tasks my grandfather had been responsible for at age seventeen, the meters he read and the decks he mopped. He’d been “in combat,” which I gleaned from one story he told of shelling the hills around a bay in Korea, but something stopped me from asking about guns or death. I’m sure I wanted to know if he had killed someone, or at least fired his gun, but I felt I had earned his trust and I was afraid to lose it. I simply let the stories fall as they may.
As I got older, my curiosity continued to grow. When I started working I asked him everything there was to know about his job. How many people did he manage? What happens when there are cost overruns on a proposal? Where did the office socialize? Again I was pulled back into another world, where hats were passed for Friday night beer money and coworkers had dinner together with their families. Grandad spoke of his career like a New Deal poster: “The General Manager of the entire division called me into his office and told me to make the project twice as productive at half the cost. So I did.” How he did so was always less important than the underlying themes: be confident, work hard, do the right thing. So much of the knowledge I’ve accumulated so far came from those discussions with him: poker odds, how coins are valued, military history, world capitals. I tried to subtly bounce ideas off of him, particularly when it came to my relationship with Anne. “How did you get along with Grandy’s brothers?” I’d ask. “How did you decide to propose?”
Grandad inadvertently taught me a lot about what it meant to respect others, even as the majority of his stories involved people that seemed to deserve none of his respect. I learned city government to be incompetent, full of moronic traffic planners and corrupt congressmen, all of whom it was implied were getting rich at our expense. I can’t remember a single time I heard him commend another driver on their lane changes or parking jobs, and to hear my grandfather talk about customer service was to listen to a man defeated. He was particularly incensed by a few great injustices: the idling speed cameras spread throughout Baltimore County and construction speed limits upheld during times when there was no construction work to be seen. There were moments when the amount of time he spent in the car, driving Grandy to doctor’s appointments and taking us wherever we wanted to go, seemed to give him nothing else to think about.
But those stories were white noise compared to what he said about JFK, and the Chinese engineer who had worked for him for years; about his parents’ loose credit standards at their store during the Great Depression and how Grandy’s brothers had served their countries in foreign wars and as public servants back home. About them all, Grandad was characteristically reserved in his praise. That his parents had practically given away their store in the crash was not a matter of pride for him, but simply acknowledged as the right thing to do. In fact, it seemed everyone who did any good in his mind did so because it was right, not because they were heroes, or saints, or geniuses. I took note.
Almost all of these conversations happened over food or in the car on the way to a restaurant. Pieced together, the places we’ve eaten read like a timeline of our relationship: one-pound burgers at Alonso’s, crab cakes at Mount Washington Tavern, wings at Chili’s and Bill Bateman’s, a whole lot of everything at McFaul’s. Each place had it’s own ritual. At Alonso’s, Grandad cut his burger in half and expected me to take it off his plate when I had finished mine. At Mount Washington Tavern, our order always included crab cakes to-go for Grandy, while she was still alive. At McFaul’s, our current favorite, the meal hinges on whether we’re seated in the quiet dining area or the loud bar. Grandad can never seem to remember how often we’ve been there, and he is constantly asking me if I’ve tried the fish and chips, the same fish he has shoveled onto my plate over a dozen times. Those are the few moments when his 88 years start to show.
That is how years passed. My grandfather loves food, and loves for his grandchildren to be fed, and so we had what felt like a mutually beneficial relationship: I would spend time with him and be taken out to eat in the process. No matter how much I enjoyed our time together, I always felt like I was doing something for him. He was the grandparent, he was the lonely one, and I was entertaining him. When people heard how much time we spent together they would comment on how great it was that I sacrificed time to see him, and part of me felt that it was pretty great of me. There was no question he enjoyed my presence, particularly after Grandy passed away. I was being a good grandson.
The older I got, the more small chinks in that fiction started to appear. While in college, calls with Grandad started to help calm my Sunday anxiety, and I found myself falling back on him whenever I felt a tightness in my chest. I told him everything that was going on in my life, and found that he kept secrets very well, whether explicitly told to or not. “I told Grandad about your ticket and he said you’d told him a few weeks ago,” my mom said to me on the phone one day, surprised to learn I’d confided in him first. He was becoming a sounding board for things I didn’t want to involve my parents in. I think I instinctually felt, whether warranted or not, that there was no wrong I could do in his eyes. He simply listened, no judgement.
Not only was I developing a dependency on his companionship, I was also starting to notice how much I genuinely enjoyed spending time with him. Grandchildren may hang out with their grandparents, and enjoy it to a certain degree, but the assumption is generally that pretty much anything else would be more fun. But that was not the case for me. I found myself going to my grandfather’s apartment for movie marathons and to binge watch TV shows – things I could have done alone, or with friends, but that I chose to do with him. I liked getting breakfast with Grandad because we both appreciate standard diner fare a lot more than the rest of my family, and I also liked that we both always ordered the same thing. I laughed constantly when I was with him. Our relationship seemed to climax when I changed his order for him without even asking – “he doesn’t want the fried onions on that” – and when I told him I would come over to spend whole days together, instead of for specific plans. Half of our time spent together wasn’t really together, with Grandad in his room playing online poker and me watching Netflix on his couch. But it felt like quality time all the same, particularly when either one of us fell asleep for an entire episode of something we were watching. Recently, I picked him up with Sinatra playing in my car. “Jeez, this is really old,” he said as he got in. He probably found our overlapping interests suspect in just the same way I did.
When I moved back to Baltimore after graduation, any pretense of myself on the supportive side of the equation disappeared. I was in my first year of a long distance relationship with Anne, struggling with a desire to slow down my drinking and make some positive changes in my life, and I fell back on my routine with Grandad as a way to calm my anxiety and, on a more practical side, fill in the void created by not spending time with Anne or in bars with my friends. One Friday night, sitting on my couch at around 7pm, feeling particularly blue and sorry for myself, I gave Grandad a call. If he was surprised to hear from me at a time when I was supposed to be out having fun, he didn’t mention it, and instead invited me to come have dinner with him. Knowing fully well that he had already eaten at that point, I took him up on his offer, and we ended up having a particularly garish meal at McFauls: meat plate, oysters, mussels, wings, starter salads, crab cakes with an extra side of mac and cheese and fish and chips. Each and every piston was firing, every joke landed and each story was better than the one before. On the way home, after we’d watched John Wick for the third time together, I cranked down the windows and blasted America, by Simon and Garfunkel, so full of emotion at having such a good friend and grandfather and not knowing how to deal with it.
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So here I am. I am almost 27 years old and Grandad is pushing 89. We live apart, and so every moment spent together feels just a bit sacred, a bit more important than it otherwise would. To try to quantify the impact he has had on my life, to put a label on our relationship, would be an insult to what he has meant to me. He has been a guardian, a friend, a teacher, an inspiration, a crutch, a mentor and a disciplinarian. Above all, he has been an amazing grandparent.