A Day in the Life of Chaos

When I was a young man, maybe 13 years old, I visited my grandfather before he died. He was a salty old man, well he looked old. In truth I don’t think he was much older than 65.  Come to think of it that’s only 13 years older than I am now.  The thought makes looking in the mirror a whole new experience.  How could he have looked so old?  I think people of his generation just looked older.  Maybe they lived harder lives. Maybe it was the years of cigarettes or gallons of booze. Maybe it was being a Navy veteran in a war this world is starting to forget. Maybe he was just a sick man with paper thin skin wrapped like cray paper  over worn and fading tattoos.  A man dying of a disease that took him when war and motorcycles never could.  Before he died, as a young boy, I sat beside him and he presented me with memories he thought I might appreciate. One was his Navy Blue Jacket Manual, a guide to being a seaman.  Another was a large certificate I barely understood. It looked impor

The first time I remember confronting death was as a child.  My mother took me to visit my paternal grandmother and grandfather in a Los Angeles suburb.  It was the kind of place that the original boom California generation moved to as a relief for what central Los Angeles had become. I was twelve years old and my memories of my grandfather were limited as we had moved north to Alaska when I was two years old.  I had only seen him a couple of times since then and those memories were clouded in the fog of early youth.  Memories colored by photographs that likely don’t recall but simply recreate a memory that had left the mind or been buried within its deep recesses.    My grandfather was debilitated.  He sat in his naugahyde recliner with a blanket wrapped around him watching reruns of Bonanza and Big Valley.  He was suffering from brain cancer and his time was limited but when you are young, and have no concept of death, time seems to have little finality.  For a young mind, Gra