songs my grandpa taught me

the things my grandpa says sound like beachy it-girl craft store signs

(come on, baby, relax)

like accidental-on-purpose sexism in the name of chivalry

(you don't buy dinner, you make dinner)

like ridiculous melodrama

(before taking another rapier thrust to the heart, i surrender upon bended knee)

like benedictions and divine responsibilities

(be good, baby)

like a faraway place i'm still learning to visit. not just an old man, but a real, complex, weary person. funny, and long-winded, and wry.

he calls them epistles; he laughs at himself. i laugh and i groan and i give him a rib. he explains in parenthesis his physical self, and when he means "because" he types "for" even though i've never heard it said quite that way aloud.

he's shifting registers. i learn him, and i learn him. he teaches me to play the horn, and so i learn him.

it's the action, not the result, and i hope his good intentions take him to heaven. what he shows me, even if unintentionally: the manifest difference 'tween patience and hard work. remember - not why you're doing it, but what and who you're doing it for.

not just for his approval - never so, no, never. but it's a marker, there, all the same.

he sends facebook video. i send tumblr post. we're not souls out of time, just clumsy friends. but he calls it "writing me" and uses the heart emoji when he can't say the word (<3 ya, <3 ya, always <3 ya) and navigates the cracked screen single-fingered, squinting through wire-plain frames. does he remember how to save and send pictures? he figures it out, for me.

he hates being in pictures. i'm not sure he acknowledges how often i hate seeing myself in them, too. but we both like seeing the other. that's a memory. that's something you can see, something you can show.

new and old platitudes, every concert and outing. the bear, which eats you every time you don't eat it, is on the menu, so let the games begin. spit it out. you gotta breathe from your ass to your elbow. if i call you at three in the morning, you gotta be able to play that C. and he might, he might, he might. (i will, i will, i will.)

i send him my poems. i might send him this. he shakes his head at the idea that i'd let my friends read my journal, such as it is, but he reads it all the same, because i ask him to. he's my friend. he's my best friend.

he hasn't known me since birth, hasn't seen me when i was truly tiny except in the stray few photos i have (back when i was the littlest of little bits, as he steals the nickname and literal diminutive from his best friend because i happened to stress how i like it so much). and still, he's getting to know me as i get to know myself. how lucky, i. how lucky, he. how lucky, we.

and someday, he won't be. someday, of course, he'll be gone. it'll be me, carrying on, with the friends he loved because i chose them, and the horn he gave me because i made it sing.

because he taught me how. because he loved me.

for the songs we know, well, they're good ones
for the people we love, well, they're better yet
for the lessons we've learned, well, we've earned them
for the cards we're dealt, well, we get what we get

not things he's said, verbatim. but i think...probably, they're close enough. i think he taught me his voice, more than his vision. i think he taught me this strange confessional honesty, and a penchant for dispensing with cageyness through brute-force cleaving to intuition.

i will check, as he attests, if he's got a heart, after all. no choice, bent over his hump of a belly. and his arm, around me, will remain forevermore, even as the metronome of his song, eventually, stops.