Dear Blaise: About Your Grandfather is a fragment by Jack Rusher, published here Friday, January 16, 2004. It is part of Memories.
The first in a series of letters to a son I don’t have. He is, perhaps cruelly, named for the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal.
Dear Blaise,
I am writing you today about your grandfather, David Lee Rusher. I can’t say that I knew the man well. I know a collection of biographical facts, of course, and I can retell many of his stories, but, because his stories were all action with no internality, I don’t really know much about him.
Some of the things I do know:
- He was the kind of man who was willing to kill other men when he deemed it needful, though I believe he regretted doing so.
- When I was small I would lay upon his chest and the sound of his gravelly voice would shake his ribcage like one of those coin operated “Magic Fingers” beds one sometimes find in cheap motels.
- He scorned artistic pursuits as frivolous, but was once a beat poet.
- I smell like him and you probably do too. When I work in the hot sun without a shower for a couple of days — hauling concrete to earn extra money when I was fourteen, for instance — I develop a ripe masculine odor that’s nearly identical to his but different from anyone else’s.
- He spent the weekends of his youth in New York City clubs listening to Dizzy, Bird and Monk change the face of jazz. He once told me it was the speed metal of his generation — the music of angry young men.
- Although he routinely exposed me to things that developmental psychology texts would label as disastrously age-inappropriate, I would not be who I am today without those experiences.
- He was a good boxer and a better fighter.
- When I was young and he was sober, there were no beatings. He believed that a harsh talking-to was sufficient and, given that he was a somewhat terrifying man, he was correct — I would have preferred a beating to the cold in his eyes.
- He was a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath bore me on his back a thousand times.
I hope that you will never need to write a letter like this to your children; that I will be the sort of man who is able to share his emotional as well as factual and intellectual life with his children.
Yours,
J.