My maternal grandfather, Gerald Desmond, died four years before I was born, but his legacy lived on through his collection of Charles Addams cartoon books that lived in my grandparents' study. All three of my siblings and all ten of my first cousins on that side of the family (and I) spent many Christmas and Thanksgiving hours visiting Grandma and delighting in the pitch-dark humor of Mr. Addams. All fourteen of us grandchildren have a taste in humor that could be described gently as "dry" and less gently as "sick", though it probably evens out to "reasonably dark". My grandpa also had several photographic books of so-called "freaks", so at an early age I enjoyed looking at pictures of bearded ladies, real-life wolfmen, conjoined twins and women with three legs (a particular favorite, and even now I am not certain why). One of my cousins has a huge tattoo of the Addams family house on her leg, and was featured on one of those Wacky Weddings programs when she got married in a rather gothic ceremony. The Charles Addams cartoons, though, are always relentlessly cheerful in a way. It's gallows humor, but it's damn happy gallows humor. Reading Charles Addams cartoons always cheers me up the same way reading Douglas Adams (whoa! I didn't notice that until now, typing!) books always cheers me up.
I recently wrote a short story about that room where the Addams cartoon books were to be found and about living with my grandmother one spring and summer when I was 23 and she was recovering from a head injury (she had fallen off a ladder). My grandma died nearly two years ago, and her house was recently sold. She had one of the most beautiful persimmon trees in her garden, but it was chopped down for some reason by the new buyers. She was quite an amazing woman - an atheist (or "heathen", as she put it) who raised five children as Catholics, a librarian, a woman who studied law at Stanford way back in the 1930s, a woman of extremely sharp wit and tongue, someone who loved life, someone you'd always want at your dinner parties, but were always a little bit afraid of. She would come visit us up in Alaska and tell my mom that we four kids were getting spoiled (which would make us (the kids) seethe), and that we weren't using our "ly"-endings properly with our adverbs, a slur my mother found worse. Grandma was probably right, but at least I wrote "properly" in the sentence preceding this one. That's hardly Grandma's only legacy, and I doubt that the dark sense of humor was my grandfather's only bequest; it was only the most tangible one. We knew he had touched those glossy pages and chuckled too. I think that made us laugh louder, to prove something to him, our invisible dead grandfather, and to us, who wanted to know him better.
Here is a
bridge named after my grandfather. You can follow it to the ultimate in 1950s glamor ships, the
Queen Mary.
P.S. I just read that Ewan McGregor ran over the bridge in the film The Island and I think that's pretty damn cool, mainly because Ewan is pretty damn cute.
