Memories

One of my regrets is that I never got to England after getting my Flip camera.

You’ve met my grandfather through his written work here on the site; reading his last one, I was struck by the immediacy of it, the way you read it and feel that he’s still there, alive in his work. I hope the same will be said about me one day.

And yet this is only half the story. Imagine reading a transcript of a Robin Williams stand-up comedy special, as opposed to watching it live (if you can’t remember Williams ever being funny, substitute Chris Rock in the analogy). That presence, that delivery…here was a larger than life character, born to be a public speaker. I wanted to film him so badly, repaying the favor from many years ago, when he and his early video camera captured the first attempts at screenwriting from my childhood, the parents roped in as actors.

Those of you who know me, and I mean REALLY know me, have likely seen the two distinct sides of me: the performer and critic who’s colorful and outspoken and dramatically fearless, versus the human being who is very personally guarded and defensive. My grandfather was the former, but all the time, where I have not the energy to always be “on.” In part, his deafness contributed, making him louder than anyone in the room, but there was also a manic energy that drove him to be the center of attention, not in a malicious way, though sometimes felt to be at the expense of his children, who certainly didn’t let him forget it. My grandmother always seemed content to be the stoic and steady one, the quiet backbone in the background. They were very traditional in a way, but not hidebound by outdated prejudices.

Indeed, ask anyone who casually knows me now if they’d imagine I had much in common with an English country vicar besides DNA, and you’d probably be met skeptically. Yet looked at in one sense, this was a man who wrote and performed a new monologue every week. Yes, it’s called a “sermon” in his context, but it is very much something to be crafted and delivered in the most effective manner possible, and if you aren’t at least the tiniest bit a scribe and a thespian, the value diminishes. When I made him the sweatshirt that read, “Before LYT, there was ME!”, I meant it not just in terms of heredity. I have often felt that perhaps he alone in the Graham clan understood the rush of performing, and the side of me that craved that too. Two family gatherings ago, I did a live performance of “Ice Ice Baby” following several musical numbers by other family members, and he singled mine out as the one he was most pleased to see. He also liked the rainbow hair – other males in the family had more conventional colors, but styled it into “fashionably untidy” looks, whereas mine, whatever its hue, was neatly brushed.

I didn’t attend many of his sermons, as I have rarely found a church service besides weddings and funerals that hadn’t become tedious by the end of the hour, with its monotone hymns and tediously fundamentalist creed recitation (my grandfather insisted that the creeds spoke for the church’s belief in general, and he was comfortable saying them as such, even though they reflected a more literalistic belief than he held). I have heard tell of a time when I was young and taken to church with the whole UK family, and took issue with the creed, saying something like, “It says to say ‘I believe in God,’ but I don’t!” A generous nearby parishioner told me that it was okay, I didn’t have to say it if I didn’t want to.

I do remember a sermon of his I attended that I think was around the age of 12, that was about sympathy and empathy. He talked about a man jumping in the ocean, only to scream, “Help! I can’t swim!” (He delivered the hypothetical man’s lines in falsetto, for whatever reason). The sympathetic man, he said, jumps in after, then screams, “I can’t swim either!” The empathetic man puts on a life jacket, grabs two more, and jumps in to save them both.

Later in the sermon, he directed us to talk to the people in the pew beside us, telling them about something important to us, after which they would then have to repeat back what we’d said. Well, at 12, with other kids about my age, the talk was of comic books and tractors and the like. It seemed an odd exercise, and I think it makes more sense as an adult. It is also quite unlike the standard church concept of a minister simply preaching at you.

One of the most amazing things about Peter Graham is that he never stopped growing or learning, careful to avoid becoming set in his ways if anyone indicated to him that those ways were in any way detrimental – he had even recently started his own Facebook page. Contrary to the image of the dogma-spouting preacher, he loved to be challenged on his views, or asked for advice. He told me once of some missionaries who came to his door – either Mormons or Witnesses, I forget which – and asked him if they could speak to him about their religion. He agreed, provided that when they were done, they’d let him speak to them about his. A few days later, he got a phone call from their main office asking him to please stop converting their younger members.

He was gang-raped as a youth, shot down in a Spitfire over Germany, survived in a POW camp where he sometimes ate dead cat and pieces of his leather belt to keep from starvation, quit smoking, raised four children…and both attended and administered counseling for many years after. It was recently brought to my attention that he recently managed to befriend the Commandant of the German POW camp – as the only prisoner with good German-speaking skills, he knew the guy was not a big Nazi sympathizer and had a poor family to support, and he spoke on the man’s behalf when the camp was finally liberated.

As a man of God, he had little patience for fundamentalism, always wondering how anyone who had been fully trained in the church could possibly believe the Bible was meant literally. He thought of himself as fairly orthodox within the church, but was happy to rock the boat a little bit. After The Last Temptation of Christ came out, he didn’t see it (though he would watch it with me on TV many years later) but gave a sermon in which he said that since Jesus was a fully mortal man, it would be ridiculous to assume he never had sexual feelings. This prompted one congregant on the way out to respond, “You wicked, wicked man!” He always felt that it was crucial for Jesus to be a human being with all the attendant frailties, rather than a sinless, supernatural one…but also that he was a window through which the divine could be seen.

I envy my cousins Simon and Lucy that they both were able to have their and my grandfather preside over their marriages. Lucy’s was a fairly traditional affair, though his sermon included a moment in which he dramatically asserted that you should be able to yell at God and tell Him you hate Him if you feel it; this bit was conspicuous by its absence on the video of the event that I was given! Simon’s was a more delicate balancing act – the parents of the bride were – I want to say Sikh, but Bel, please forgive me if I am mistaken. Grampy was told he could mention God but not Jesus, and he was fine with that.

The specific memories, though, pale to the overall impression. Old people in media are often depicted as clueless, frightened, senile, conservative; and family gatherings as tension-filled opportunities for secret boozing and festering grudges. The Graham side of my family has never been this way, and he was the one who set the tone. I don’t think any of us ever felt any less than enthusiastic about getting the whole clan together: board games, fine cookery, and endless rounds of Boules were sure to follow.

The last one for me was around two years ago, right before WICKED LAKE. The next one was going to be in May…now it will likely be a lot sooner, and with a far more notable absence. He knew with certainty that he was going to be with God forever, and I envy him that. The physical body was frail, the memory spotty as aged memories generally are, but the mind remained sharp (credit, perhaps, the daily cryptic crossword). I have always imagined that the least worst way to go would either to be so suddenly you’d barely notice, or after the mind has gone and you are oblivious. 86 is a respectable age to live until; only because his mother survived past 100 did we greedily expect more.

It was my pleasure to share his words with all of you, but his, even more so. I wish he had been web-savvier and interacted more in the comments, as he would have had he known how, but he certainly enjoyed the reader Q&A feature we did. He loved an audience every bit as much as I do, and while he never expected those columns – sermons, basically – to exceed a local readership of 24 or so, I know he’d be honored by all the tributes I’ve received on his behalf here, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

I think it was around four years ago, at a new year’s gathering, that I looked across the room to the couch on which both my grandparents sat. He had fallen asleep, and she lightly caressed his hand. In his slumber, an unmistakable sigh? moan? of joy escaped his lips, the love still alive, the touch of his one true still an arousal. They had their rough spots, but pushed through to something deeper at the other end. And, incidentally, without giving details he did make it clear that their sex life had not ended with age.

He did at times have an odd sense of propriety: My copy of his autobiography, SKYPILOT, is simply signed “Luke Thompson from Peter Graham 1-11-01.”

But then there was this email he sent to me following the re-election of George W, Bush in 2004:

“I hear you’re depressed. So are we, though perhaps not so severely. To-day’s Guardian part two came out with the front cover all in black with just two words written on it in white: “O God!”.

I think the vast majority of Europeans feel devastated by the result. I’m afraid that hatred of the Bush regime is tending to make many people throughout the world become Americanophobes. It’s partly the size of his majority in the popular vote that has us worried. For me personally it’s this terrible lesson that Christianity appears now to represent all that is backwood, irrational, selfish, greedy, patriarchal, homophobic and bellicose. I guess I could think up quite a few more adjectives. And I have to commit my thoughts on this for our very local paper, the Parish Magazine, for which I do a monthly article.

I suppose we must now expect war on Iran and North Korea as well as lots more bloodshed in Iraq.

Maybe John Kerry was the wrong man. I know the general view here was simply that anyone would be better than Bush.

At least among many of us there is intense sympathy for that half of the USA which did not want four more years of the same. Life must go on and our hope is that you may be able to produce some good and successful work in the year ahead. Whatever it looks like I believe firmly that in the end all will be well.”

As Dr. Manhattan from WATCHMEN might say: “In the end? Nothing ever ends…”

It is my firm hope that where the spirit of Peter Graham is concerned, that assessment is correct.