The men in the family (revised memoir)

Like father like son, I hear this statement all the time from my friends and family. People say that my dad and I are almost exactly the same person, besides the fact my dad is way shorter than me (about five inches) and almost instantly has a five o clock shadow right after he shaves, and his hair still consists of that wavy style from back in the eighties and nineties that he will never let go of. Before writing this I wouldn’t have just laughed it off and agreed with them not knowing with what I was truly agreeing with. I don’t know to take this as a compliment or as an insult, I like to view it as a compliment. But they are right my dad and I are much alike, in fact all the men in our family are very much alike. I just cant seem to accept that, I want to be my own individual, I want others to think of me as someone different than my dad, not to say that my dad is a bad person, its just that I want my own identity, but when I tried to think about traits and characteristics that I have that my dad doesn’t, it was very difficult. The more and more I realize it, I am my father, just a lot taller, and the more and more I think about it I accept the fact and welcome it, because it was him who made me the person I am today. The only thing different between my dad and I, is that I am a way more calm person then he ever is or will be, I can thank my mom for that. My mom reminds me of this every day, that’s one thing she wishes he would be better at. I am a more of the go with the flow and is ready for whatever type person, and he is the lets stick to the plan and it needs to go that way type of person and if it doesn’t he is a nervous wreck. Both of us have ADHD, but I am the only one who will admit to it and is diagnosed with it, every now and then he will admit to it but he will never in his lifetime go to the doctor and get tested for it, I accept things for what that are a lot easier and faster than he does.

My dad is always worried (shown by his sprouts of grey hair here and there) about making other people happy and making sure that they are having a good time, this is one trait that I am glad that he passed onto me. It makes me feel good to make other people laugh and be happy, so I try to do it everywhere I go. I have always wondered if my friends think about me the same way my dad’s friends think about him. Sometimes my dad can be a little bit to much to handle, he always wants to be in control and make sure things go as planned. He is known as the one to have a good time, which fits his personality perfectly. His friends always joke with him and give him a hard time because they know they can get under his skin really easy and get him all mad and defensive, but that’s what friends are for right? My dad is a source of a lot of peoples entertainment, at his expense that is. He’s notorious for getting your name wrong, the whole Castner family is known for this actually, but my dad has seem to master this trade very well. He will say five different names before he actually gets it right, its one of the funniest things to witness, his friends make fun of him for it all the time. He doesn’t do it all the time just when he has something exciting to say or he is in a rush. They also give my dad a hard time for being extremely nervous. Which is very true, my dad is very antsy person and very nervous at times, actually most of the time. He has a nervous habit, which he so graciously passed down to me, of biting his nails when he is either board or nervous. He never needs to use fingernail clippers on them because he bites them so much, they're actually nubs most of the time. The fingernail stops right where it meets the end of the finger. My mom gets so mad when she catches him doing this because she says it’s disgusting because he spits them on the floor when he is done, which I have to agree with but I can’t harp on him to much for that because I do it as well.

Most of my funny and energetic characteristics come from my dad, another trait that I am glad he passed on to me, but this is also why him and I but heads and argue all the time. We are both the same person but I’m more on the calm relaxed side then he is and I get that from my mom. She is the quiet sensitive loving type, who is always telling everyone I love you all the time. She also always seems to be the one always to walk in while me and my dad are wrestling, to yell stop it your going to break the furniture, as if she cared more about the furniture then us getting hurt, but we just play it off like she never even said anything and just keep fighting till the other one gets hurt and she just storms out of the room. I don’t really think you would consider what we do wresting, more like putting each other in headlocks and other types of submissions until the other one gives up, my dad so maturely taking my hand and making me hit myself and saying “Stop hitting yourself dumbass.” He is the one that usually wins though I’m just the one that always starts the fight with the question “Want to fight?” and he replies with “Ya, Join the army.” thinking he’s so funny. One time he had to go to the doctor because I hurt his wrist really bad from wrestling, the doctor told him he was going to need surgery if he didn’t stop wrestling with me and let it heal. Both my dad and I are really competitive towards each other, and I don’t mean just like a father son competitive I mean like a competitive attitude you would have towards your friends or rival team, we are always talking about who is better at what and who can do more of what, I get this strong competitive nature from him and I am glad I did because it has helped me a lot when it came to sports. We are always playing one on one basketball, and he loves to cheat at that because he hates losing as much as I do. One time my friends and I were playing outside on my hoop in the front yard, so he decided to come out and play with us making it three on three, at the end of the game my friends decide it would be a good idea for my dad and I to play one on one. They know about the competitive attitude between the two of us and that we would agree and it would be a very entertaining game to watch. This game comes up so often with my friends and I because they actually witnessed how competitive my dad and I truly are and how much of a funny thing it was to witnesses it. I almost broke my fingers in that game, blocking his shot of course, because I was so determined to win. For an old man my dad can still move rather quickly, even though he might complain about it later if I beat him and use it as an excuse of why he lost. My mom is the completely opposite of my dad, like they always say, opposites attract. She shows much more affection then my dad does, it must be a girl thing. My dad and I show our affection by wrestling each other and punching each other, you know manly things. She gets her loving and caring since of humor from my grandpa, the other man in the family.

My grandpa is a very nice person, that is when he wants to be. He is very off and on when it comes to being nice, usually my mom has to make him feel bad about it before he is nice to her. My grandpa plays the role of the big mystery or big myth of the family. The stories he tells are something that could be strait out of a movie or book. For instance, he has had five different wives’s who have all been assassinated, or that he worked in the black market for the army. My favorite story that he tells all the time was when he was in college. I forget the college now, in fact he actually never gives the little details about the stories he tells, but he was a photographer at the time and he was up in the photographer’s booth and all of the sudden all of the football players took him down and huddled around him, tore off his cloths, put pads, and a uniform on him. They put him in the game as a quarterback because the starting quarterback got hurt, so they put him in and he threw a sixty yard pass to win the game. He said that they saw him throw a football during practice one time and knew that he had a good arm. Another story that he tells all the time is one when he was in the war. During WWII he and another soldier were walking pass a house that was bombed and there was nothing left but a door and a basement. They walk in the door and there sits a mother and a daughter who have been living in this blown up house with nothing to eat or sleep on. So my grandpa reaches in his boot and hands the mother a piece of paper that was worth a million dollars, I can't exactly remember where he got that money from or why he had it, but it was something involving a top secret mission of course.

Why does my grandpa tell these extravagant stories, maybe because he wants to entertain or maybe he wants to be viewed as the awesome grandpa? It's not so much that these stories are a hundred percent made up but they are more or less real events that have happen to him to some extent, just blown out of proportion with many added details. I think it is mainly because he doesn’t want us to view him as a boring person who has led an uneventful life. Now don't get me wrong my grandpa has had some amazing things happen in his life time and has visited many extravagant places, but he drowns them out with all these stories he tells. My mom has wondered about these stories for a long time and which ones and how much of them are true. She finally decided to talk to his sister who lives in Chicago and ask her all about them and get the facts strait. She found out that most of them are false to a certain extent, but a part of me still believes them anyways, just because its fun to. Every time we visit him, he is usually ready with a new story that has nothing to do with what we are talking about at the time, he just loves to hear himself talk. Every time you start talking about yourself or talking about something that has happened to you, he has always somehow done the same thing just better then you, once again proving my theory that he wants everyone to know that he too has done awesome things in his life and that we are not the only ones who have done interesting things.

To get a better idea of what is going on in my grandpas head I decided to write what it would be like in his head and what he is thinking when he tells these stories. When we start telling him about something we are excited about he just sits there and listens for the main subject and not paying attention to the details. His brain then just starts firing off ideas of past memories that have happen to him or has happen to someone else. He then thinks, hey I need to let them know that I too have had something like this happen to me too, but I don’t want to make it seem boring so I’ll add extra details here and there to it. He then starts telling his story and its sounding so boring in his head that he is afraid that we are getting board too, so he just keeps adding more and more extravagant things to the story till its unbelievable. Not knowing that he just made something that was about us now turn into something about him, and then when is finished telling the story he thinks checkmate, as if he just toped our story.

I don’t want to go as far as saying that my grandpa has Alzheimer’s, but I wouldn’t feel bad about saying he has characteristics of Alzheimer’s, things like memory dementia, and forgetfulness. I hate to view my grandpa in this way because I know how strong he is and what kind of person he really was because of the stories of things he really did that my mom has told me, and it takes away from his image when you start talking about Alzheimer’s. In Time magazine Ray Chhetri, a café partron and a nurse-manager at a Hospital says “Looking after a dementia patient is hard work, a living bereavement.” That statement couldn’t be truer too, because I have witnessed firsthand of how hard this can be with my grandpa. My grandpa’s knees have been hurting him for quite some time now, so finally a couple of years ago he decided to get surgery on them. The surgery went really well, it’s the aftermath that was the hard part. My grandpa was a totally different person, he went in the surgery really energetic and came out almost like a zombie, he was acting exactly how a person with Alzheimer’s would. I’m actually getting goose bumps just thinking about it. My relationship between me and my grandpa was good but not as good or as loving as I would have liked it to be and it was this particular moment that made my weak relationship with him become stronger, because I realized that he is old and he could be gone in a second and that he is no longer the strong independent grandpa I use to view him as when I was little. He basically went crazy, he wasn’t acting like his normal self. We had to put him into one of those places where they look after him and take care of him because he wasn’t allowed to go home by himself, this was hard on my mom and the family as well, it was something completely new to us. It was then that I realized that my very independent grandpa was not so independent and needed our help, whether he wanted it or not. Every time we visited him he would try to get us to help him “escape," he would tell us to have the car running in the front and he would get his things together and we would make a run for it, every time my mom somehow managed to change the subject and get him going on something else. Of course it wouldn’t be grandpa if he didn’t come out of there with some stories to tell, like how the nurses were hitting on him and they were giving him medicine that made it so that he wasn’t getting any better. It was weird because after a month or so after all this had happened it was as if he slipped out of it and became normal again. It was a scary moment in my life because I thought I was about to lose him and never be able to have a normal conversation with him again, even if it was all about him or consisted of fairytale stories.


Hildebrand by Hilaire Belloc

Who was frightened by a Passing Motor, and was brought to Reason

"Oh murder! What was that, Papa!"
"My child, It was a Motor-Car,
A most Ingenious Toy!
Designed to Captivate and Charm
Much rather than to rouse Alarm
In any English Boy.

"What would your Great Grandfather who
Was Aide-de-Camp to General Brue,
And lost a leg at Waterloo,
And Quatre-Bras and Ligny too!
And died at Trafalgar!-
What would he have remarked to hear
His Young Descendant shriek with fear,
Because he happened to be near
A Harmless Motor-Car!
But do not fret about it! Come!
We'll off to Town
And purchase some!"

In this poem there is only a part that corresponds and makes me think about my grandpa and it actually gave me a much clearer picture of my grandpa and made me think about him in a different way. The second stanza where Belloc talks about how many extravagant things her grandpa has done but when it comes down to it, he is just a normal person like you and me. When this harmless car comes close to him it shows his true colors and he gets scared, displaying that even though he may have went through all these heart wrenching experiences he is still vulnerable and scared, and maybe that’s why he tells these stories, to hide these true feelings from everyone else.