In Search of My Grandfather

In 1790 someone came to the Hudson Valley and built a house there on a small hill, not far from the river. Two Hundred and Twenty Four Years later that house still stands today on that same country road in Rhinebeck, New York. Sometime later, but a long time before me, my Grandfather bought that house and lived there until he died in 2002. Besides the house and out buildings there is a pond, garden space and small fields. There is a sauna that sits below the house, close enough to the pond for that painful reality check of cold, before the quick retreat to warmth. That house has a history nearly as old as our country itself; imagine the stories it could tell. Alas it's a house after all so the stories are left to us.

Wendell Hinkey was my Mother's Dad. He grew up in Ohio, went to Cornell and spent time in Levenworth for refusing to fight in WWII. Somewhere along the way he met my Grandmother, had seven kids and moved to a commune in New York State. Life there was hard and eventually he decided it wasn't for him.  My Grandmother felt differently and stayed on. As you can imagine this caused a schism in the family that has never healed. There was however a brief period when I was a child when a thaw in the great chill came to pass. All of a sudden my grandfather flashed into our world like a comet, only to vanish for good a few years later. Suddenly we were allowed to see him a couple times a year, once at Christmas and once sometime in the summer. Now meeting my Grandfather for the first time in Junior High was pretty weird. And then to have him disappear from my life a couple years later left me wanting more. Since I  really didn't get to know him I remember him through the physical things such as the wood puzzles he made for us, the house, the barn, the two trees grafted together in the yard and swimming in the pond in summer which meant a ride on the zip line down the hill and a drop in the muddy water. I remember the old house with the creaky wooden floors that leaned to one side and taking a ride on his tractor out to cut a Christmas tree from his stand each winter. Its been over twenty years since I made those memories.

Jump with me if you will to the present. It's New York, it's December, and I am here to say my last goodbye to my dying grandmother, yes that Grandmother. She is still part of the commune at 95 and no longer gets out of bed. Instead she holds my hand as we watch the birds compete with squirrels for survival outside her window on a bitter Catskill Mountain morning. She is nostalgic in her last days, telling stories about growing up on her family orchard in southern New Jersey. She tells a favorite story about how her father would always wait to buy a tree until Christmas Eve so he could get one for a dollar; amazingly there was always a tree waiting. Good byes like this are really hard!

Its the next day, a cold, rainy, dreary day; the kind that sets New Yorkers to frantically packing for Florida. My brother, his girlfriend and I are bundled in a rental car looking for the ghost of my Grandfather. Recently there has been another thaw in the family and my brother has gotten to know my uncle who now owns that house on that country road in Rhinebeck. Is it weird that we are looking for what remains of our Grandfather at a time we are saying our last goodbyes to our Grandmother? No, the two of them, while broken, are essential to who we are today. That brokenness in the family is a huge part of us and how we think about love and family as adults. The passion, energy and curiosity about life that first brought them together are plainly seen in my uncles, cousins, siblings and nieces. Looking for memories of him as we honor her life somehow seems to knit together the story that made us wholly us. We find that house on that country road. It stands there wearing all its years but looking game for many more. It's pouring icy rain as we walk down to the pond, poke our heads in the sauna and reminisce about the tractor rides we took. That tractor is still there as are the Christmas trees, huge now and wild. The grafted tree is gone but the barn is still there along with its stash of well stacked and labeled hardwood. Despite the weather, we ride the zip line down the hill toward the ice covered pond, jumping off before we regret being big kids. The house, even with its leaning, creaky wooden floors looks as if my Grandfather had never left. We bubble over with memories as we look at the puzzles he made still on the shelf and sit at the old kitchen table where we ate with him.

It's later now, my brother and his girlfriend are on the train to Utica and I am driving through the dark to J.F.K. We know we will probably never see our Grandmother alive again. And unless we find some long lost history we won't learn much more about our Grandfather. There is talk that my uncle may sell the old house on the country road in Rhinebeck. I hope that never happens as we want to bring our own kids there some day to ride that zip line built by their Great Grandfather. I know where my grandmother will be buried. It's a quiet, beautiful hilltop with a view of her favorite mountains. I don't know if my Grandfather has a grave or if he was cremated. That old house on the country road in Rhinebeck is where I will go to find him.