That’s Life: Grandpa’s Spurs
I was cleaning out a closet when I found the painting I had given to my grandfather almost 25 years ago. It was painted by an old fiddler, Vernon Thompson from White Earth, in the North Dakota Badlands.
The painting depicts a rearing horse, a cowboy hanging on for dear life, and another startled team of horses pulling a wagon as some kind of alien—a Ford Model-T—chugs toward them. It reminded me of the age my grandfather was born into, a transition from the era of the horse to the machine age. That painting hung on Grandpa’s living room wall until he died, and then I got it back.
I paired it on the wall with another western painting by Del Iron Cloud, but no matter how I arranged them, the arrangement was missing something.
“Maybe an old lariat,” my sister, who had stopped by for a visit, suggested. “Maybe even a hat.”
“I was thinking that, too,” I said, “and maybe even spurs.”
For a moment, I allowed myself to imagine my grandfather’s spurs hanging on the wall, but they were long gone, surely in the more worthy hands of a son or daughter.
I admired that old Russian. He was rakishly handsome to the end, blonde hair gone silver, steely-blue eyes that could stop you as dead as his lever-action 30-30 Winchester. It was his saddle gun, the cracked stock held together by a bolt and a hexagon-shaped nut, worn smooth over the years.
I remember as a boy watching him spot something in the field I couldn’t see. Only when the pack of wild dogs began scattering from the dirt kicked up under them, did I even see what he was shooting at 250 yards away if it was a foot. Years later, after I bounced my first shot in front of a puzzled buck 80 yards away with that very same rifle, I understood the level of skill it took to loft those shells with such accuracy at such a distance.
Even when he was well into his 70’s, he still regularly rode Chopper, a big chestnut quarter horse every bit as tough and ornery as my grandfather seemed to be if you didn’t wait around long enough for the twinkle in his eye and the chuckle that emerged from a sly grin along with a puff of pipe smoke.
For years he rolled his own cigarettes—the cowboy way. Then, in the interest of his health, he used lemon drops to wean himself from the habit. In his later years, though, he took up smoking again because, you know, at that point, what the hell.
As a rite of spring, Chopper would dump him the first time out, and Grandpa would get right back on, each to prove to the other that he still could.
I filled one spot on the wall with an old brown Stetson that looked like it jumped right out of Vernon Thompson’s painting. But still there was a void.
It turned out my mother had the spurs, and she delivered them to me last Sunday along with a bonus—Chopper’s bit. The spurs had some rust, the leather was hard and dry, and so, perfect. I tacked them up with the bit and then, finally, the wall looked right. A touchstone. A place where memories are stirred.
Some people might remember him as impenetrably stubborn, intimidating, and he could be. He reveled in nature’s solitude, in the bite of the wind, the caress of the sunshine after the rain, in the satisfaction of a problem solved with a welding torch and an inventor’s soul.
Good intentioned young ministers tried to save him, but they didn’t understand that he’d already found God. He just hadn’t found church.
I don’t think I have put Vaseline on the lens of my memory the way photographers used to do to smooth all the lines of fading beauties. I don’t think I have softened the focus, either.
The view of a grandson is naturally idyllic and vested in truth. With the benefit of time and seasoning, is it possible to know our grandparents at their best. Some grow bitter, some spoil outright, unable to reconcile unrequited dreams with reality, but most emerge better, more patient, wiser. When the world is working right, this wisdom, the ache of regret, absorbed and passed on, makes successive generations better. And in time, we will all be holy.
Those spurs connect me. For you it might be a tea cup, a faded portrait, a watch passed from wrist to wrist. There is power in such talismans, real power that reminds us who we are, and more importantly, who we ought to be.