One of the most singularly generous people I've ever known died today.
I met Diz almost twenty years ago, when I started dating his daughter. We met, actually, when I awoke on his living room sofa after a boozy night with her.
He golfed, he gardened, he could fix literally anything that can be broken, he designed non-nuclear parts for nuclear weapons (which is all he ever really said about a career in a building with no windows where each desk had—no kidding—a safe for putting your paperwork in if you were even going to pee). But most of all, he was the Übergrandpa.
His own father had been a movie theater projectionist, a line of work which meant almost zero father-son contact, and Elmer seemed to have decided he was going to overcompensate for that when he became a father. Maybe it was also waiting for years to adopt my ex wife and her brother, that he didn't take kids for granted.
But if he was an active father (he was the Dad who volunteered to coach whatever his kids showed an interest in playing), he really went into overdrive when he retired and found himself with grandkids.
I remember his first Christmas as a Grandpa, he had the whole bed of his pickup full of presents, a veritable Santa's sleigh. Some of it was stuff for me and his daughter, who were just setting up housekeeping ourselves, but a lot of it was for my nephew, the first grandchild.
I made a lighthearted comment about spoiling children, not really meaning anything by it, as we loaded stuff in. He looked at me like I was some sort of heretic, and said, 'Not possible.'
But the material aspect isn't really what was amazing. It was the energy and patience and enthusiasm he had for his grandchildren.
When we were first grappling with Mo's autism, he only saw a stubborn, strong-willed kid who was going to do what she thought needed done, and damn what anyone else thinks. And he saw it with pure love.
I remember one time when she stayed the night at his house, she got up at 4:30 in the morning and headed for the basement. He followed, wanting to know what she wanted, and found she'd gone straight for the sky swing. So he hung it, and as the sun started to illuminate the horizon, he swung her in it for an hour or so. He wasn't pissed about missing sleep, he didn't even see it as Mo being a high maintenance child. It was just time to swing, and he was glad she'd let him know it.
He turned his back yard into a wonderland for kiddos. Built a first-rate jungle gym, bought a trampoline with a safety cage, bought the aforementioned sky swing, a hammock, etc.
I told you about how he could fix it if it broke? Diz was financially comfortable, though he only seemed to enjoy spending money if it was on other people. He did not, for instance, have any patience for spending money on cars. When I met him he was driving a '74 Nova, a car he bought when the car he was driving for a family vacation to California died on the first leg of the trip. He also had a '76 Olds Custom Cruiser and a seventy-something Buick Skylark. This last car, I remember one time he was working on it when I got to their house and I teased him, 'How long are you going to keep this car?'
'Until I can't get parts for it,' was his answer.
He explained to me a couple of times that it wasn't that he couldn't afford a new car, but he just couldn't justify paying hundreds of dollars in property taxes to own one. He'd much rather tape a window down with duct tape to keep it from flapping than pay a tax on a car that's not falling apart.
Another aspect of his generosity: he mowed the grass of the house next door to his for something like 25 years because it needed one. Nobody asked him to do it, nobody paid him for it. Until the son of the owner of the house next door was clearing things out for the house to be sold, and found out Diz would be ecstatic about having a twenty-plus year old car that had hardly been driven, I don't think anyone thanked him for it.
That car, sadly, was involved in a wreck that ought to have taught Diz the value of seatbelts not long after he got it. It didn't make him start buckling up, but it did make him find a vehicle made during the Reagan years, the closest thing to new he would tolerate.
The grandkids, by the way, did about as much on the seatbelt front as could be done. Seatbelt laws didn't impress Diz, but one of his grandchildren experience anxiety on his behalf was serious business.
I guess for me, it's still unreal. This is a man who made kidney amyloids a minor affliction. Amyloids that baffled even the Mayo Clinic, for real.
Diz' father lived to be almost 100, too, so coupled with his ability to make major illnesses minor, I figured he had a couple more decades to go. It wouldn't really have amazed me for him to survive me, forty years or so his junior.
We'll all miss him. As bad as it is to me, it's got to be a million time's worse for the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster. And for her mother.
And for lots of others. I'm betting a lot of people are going to come out of the woodwork for the memorial (TBA). He touched a lot of lives in big ways.
PostscriptI find tucking Em in tonight, her teary recollections of Grandpa D, that I've forgotten significant things. Like his woodworking. The cedar chest, quilt racks, book shelves and so on he made because it was fun and his kids needed or wanted them. I struggle to keep up with the maintenance on one house, yet he was able to do his own and the lion's share of the work on two others when his kids turned out to be less than handy (or when they married the unhandy).
Of course there's more. Lots more. How could I possibly encapsulate, in a few hundred words, 76 or 77 years (I forget, but I'm in the ballpark) of making virtually every decision, large or small, on the basis of whether it would help someone.
