Morrow

My grandfather wanted to be Hollywood but turned out more hobbit instead. He never reached more than five-foot-three in height and had a face like a sweet potato. He was the child of a couple who met in their 50s and assumed they’d never conceive. When my grandfather came along, he was considered nothing short of a miracle, and thereby doomed to an outsized sense of himself from the start. He loved to talk about all he might have been, but for circumstances beyond his control, as if God had to balance out the perfection He had wrought with a set of human-appropriate flaws. The ultimate blow occurred at age 20, just as he was planning the move to Los Angeles to pursue his acting career. His wife, Anna, had become pregnant with my mother, and he resigned himself to an ordinary living as a traveling salesman. After that, my grandfather poured his thespian aspirations into his tobacco habit. Most men of his generation smoked, but my grandfather took it to another level. In any environment, he was rarely seen without a cigarette. Unlike most folks, who were happy enough to stick one between their fingers and let it burn without much thought, he was utterly deliberate about the way he smoked. After attending one of his Sunday matinees, which he always did alone and with the reverence of a churchgoer, at home or in whatever town he found himself, he would leave the theater excited to try out a new style, imitating whatever detective, gangster, or lover had played out his fate on screen that day. He especially resonated with Eastwood’s Blondie and, according to my grandmother, had walked around with his eyes narrowed and a cigarette clamped between his teeth for weeks in 1966. I guess it was no surprise that Marlboro became his favorite brand, the only one I ever saw in one of his small hands with their stubby fingers. When he retired, he couldn’t give up life on the road, and he and my grandmother began traveling around the country. The ashtray in their RV would be overflowing by noon, so my grandmother bought him a large thermos with a Marlboro logo to use not for hydration, but as the repository for his butts. When he’d arrive at our house for a visit, the first thing he would do was empty the thermos into our kitchen trashcan. My sister and I loved to watch the ashes blossom out like fairy dust, while our mother frowned with disgust. The trips eventually ended when my grandfather’s emphysema chained him to an oxygen tank. Last week, we took him to California on his last journey, enclosed safely inside the thermos, one of the stranger terms of his will. Under cover of night, we spread him over the walk of fame, and let the wind assimilate part of him into the angelic city’s dense atmosphere while the rest lingered among the sidewalk grit. Before turning homeward, we said a short prayer wishing him happy trails on the heels of stars.