Jeff’s Silly Little Blog

My grandpa, “Papa”, died a few months ago. October 17th, to be exact. At the time, I was so caught up in my own shit that I didn’t get to say goodbye, or didn’t even really try to. So this is me trying to.

Papa — Wendell Reuben Doolittle III. What a name, right? My dad could’ve been the fourth, and I could’ve been the fifth, but alas, it was not to be (and I’m okay with that). I don’t know much about Wendells I and II, or much about Papa’s upbringing at all, other than he grew up on the south side of Chicago.

Out of the five people I call grandparents (dad’s mom and dad; mom’s mom, dad, and stepdad), Papa was the one I was closest with. Not that it’s a competition. That’s just how it was.

Some of my earliest memories include Papa. My sisters and cousins and I would spend nights at Papa’s house and watch movies, during which Papa would inevitably fall asleep. Whenever one of us would notice, we’d laugh and tell him to wake up, and he’d laugh and claim he was “just resting his eyes” or “long blinking”, and we’d laugh even more.

Papa used to take us to the pool at Black Bob Park. I was 3 or 4 at the time and didn’t know how to swim, but I loved going down the water slides, so he would wait at the bottom and catch me. I remember he was a really good swimmer. He was one of the few adults who wasn’t too grown up to go off the diving board — always the same standard dive, but remarkably graceful for a man approaching 70.

The first time I spent more than a night or two away from my parents was during the summer when I was eight, in Stuart, Nebraska, with Nana and Papa. Apparently, my parents had trusted me to pack my own bag for the week. When I got to Stuart, Papa discovered I had packed only toys. I thought this was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. I don’t remember if Papa was amused, or upset, or a little bit of both; regardless, we drove to ALCO in O’Neill and he bought me a week’s worth of clothes and a toothbrush and whatnot. I remember that being an exceptionally fun week. We went to the demo derby and stock car races, and I’m realizing as I’m typing this that Papa may have planted the seed for my love of motorsport. We played lots of catch in the backyard — I did remember to pack my ball glove — and I had to be extra accurate, because he wasn’t quite as agile as my dad or my friends, and I’d have to chase down my bad throws. Dinners were all homemade, either by Nana in the kitchen or Papa on the grill, and always followed by dessert. I think we got ice cream every night that week.

Papa had quite the sweet tooth, which I inherited. I remember going through the Dairy Queen drive thru with him and asking for a Georgia Mud Fudge blizzard, which he relayed to the cashier as “Georgia mudbank,” then “Georgia on my mind.” I think eventually he got it right. He always had sweets in the fridge (or “icebox,” as he called it), his favorites being those skinny rectangular vanilla wafer cookies, which actually aren’t good at all and have roughly the same consistency as vanilla-flavored styrofoam. But when I was a kid, they were a delicacy, and I knew them by one name: Papa Cookies.

Of all the lessons I learned from Papa, the ones I’m most grateful for are the ones he taught me on the golf course. It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say he taught me how to hit a golf ball — most of that credit goes to my mom’s stepdad, “Pop-pop,” who cut some old clubs down to my size when I was 10 or 11 and provided me with endless balls to hit into their Texas pasture — but Papa taught me everything else about the game. He followed the rulebook to the letter, and he demanded I do the same. “Mulligans” and “gimmes” were out of the question. He taught me the unwritten rules as well — when to be quiet, where to park the cart, where you can and can’t walk on the green, where to place your ball marker. All the things that, according to him, separate a casual player from a real golfer. He was a bit of an elitist in that way and, for better or worse, I got that from him as well. Don’t step in my line, please. And can you turn your music down? This is a golf course, not a Morgan Wallen concert.

When I was 15, the summer before my junior year of high school, Papa loaned me $1500 for my first car, a 1999 Ford Contour. The car was a piece of junk, and I sold it the next summer for a fraction of what I paid for it, but it was a car. When I first asked him for the loan, he hemmed and hawed and said he’d have to talk it over with Nana. He could be a bit of a stickler like that at times, but other times he was incredibly generous. I paid him back in $20 installments by mowing his lawn those two summers, and he kept a detailed handwritten ledger of the loan balance, but I’m pretty sure he fudged the numbers, because there’s no way I mowed his lawn 75 times.

Papa loved sports, especially baseball. He and my dad and I made plenty of trips to The K to see the Royals play his beloved White Sox. I remember one game in particular: a hot Sunday afternoon in 2013, with the Royals floating around .500 and the White Sox having a down year. With two outs in the bottom of the ninth and the Royals trailing 2-0, Lorenzo Cain came to the plate and hit a two-run bomb to left-center field — exactly where we were sitting. The ball bounced off of a metal guardrail and back onto the field, otherwise it may have caromed into one of our laps.

That’s the three of us in the middle. My dad and I were ecstatic; Papa was less so. The Royals would go on to win in extra innings, and would finish the season with their first winning record in a decade. Lorenzo Cain became my all-time favorite Royal that day, a title he has yet to relinquish. The White Sox would go on to finish dead last in the division, but if I had to guess, Papa watched every pitch.

Every so often when I was in college, Papa would drive to Lawrence to take me to lunch. We always went to the same place: Jefferson’s on Mass Street. He could never remember his order, so I remembered it for him: ten traditional wings, no sauce, ranch, celery, fries, and plenty of wet naps. He always asked how my classes were going, how my car was running, if I was dating anyone. And he’d tell the same handful of stories from when he was in college — my favorite was the one about the road trip from Champaign to Pasadena to see his Fighting Illini play in the Rose Bowl. I loved those lunch dates, and he loved coming to Lawrence — “lots of pretty gals,” he would say.

Papa had many wonderful qualities, but he was far from perfect. Call him a product of his generation, I suppose, because that’s a hell of a lot kinder than the truth.

He was not particularly respectful of women, to put it mildly. Every waitress was “tutz” and would likely get a far-too-casual squeeze of her hand or touch of the small of her back. I heard stories of his hands wandering further when he was in nursing homes during his last few years, and from before that, when he was still of sound mind. He had a younger sister, Mary Lou, whom I didn’t even know existed until she died. He didn’t go to her funeral. I have a few good memories of my grandmother, Nana, but mostly I remember her being tired or ill. It wasn’t until I got older that I learned she was heavily medicated for psychiatric issues. It’s not my place to speculate on the origins of those issues, but suffice to say, I don’t think theirs was a very healthy marriage.

His three granddaughters — my sisters, Kelli and Katie, and my cousin, Lauren — received far less attention from him than my cousin Nick and myself. Maybe he didn’t know how to relate to them, or maybe he just didn’t try, but I know it bothered them, and it bothers me. I wish he had treated them the way he treated me, so that they could see him the way I see him — funny, generous, wise, loving. Despite his flaws, those are the things I will remember about him. He was a good grandfather to me.

Today would’ve been Papa’s 93rd birthday. I guess he decided to go out before the lyrics to “The Christmas Song” no longer applied to him (Frank Sinatra’s version, of course; Papa was a sucker for “Old Blue Eyes”). His birthday, my dad’s, and mine all fall within a week of each other: mine on the 8th, my dad’s on the 12th, Papa’s on the 15th. Perhaps for efficiency’s sake, the three of us would celebrate our birthdays together, and my mom would decorate the cake with candles representing our combined ages. Here’s a picture from a few years ago, before his health really began to deteriorate:

I’ll miss doing that.