Grandpa Joe

My name is Derrick Antoniak, and this is my blog about being a medical student.

This post is actually totally unrelated to medicine and to school.

I was driving down Cornhusker Road in Papillion earlier today and looking at the rows of identical houses, each with the same roof, same windows, same siding, etc. and I noticed that they all had chimneys. I thought about what the insides of those homes probably look like (with respect to the chimney), and the picture in my head was of my girlfriend's mom's house: a gas fireplace with a fake log and some large, square marble tiles surrounding it for a few feet in all directions. My first thought was involuntary: "When I build a house it will have a real wood fireplace." I didn't know why at first, since the gas ones are much easier to both operate and maintain, and I don't exactly have a massive pile of firewood sitting in the back yard as may have been the case 10 years ago. After thinking about it for a good deal longer than I probably should have, I realized that whenever I think of any aspect of owning and maintaing a home, the image in my head is always of my Grandpa Joe.

I have been fortunate enough to have lived two houses away from my grandparents for as long as I can remember. The house I live in was actually owned by my great-grandpa, and the bedroom in which I sleep was actually my grandpa's bedroom when he was growing up. The neighborhood has naturally filled in since those days, and one of the houses built just two doors down was built by my grandfather during his time as a bricklayer. My earliest memories start at about age 5, at which age I was already living in this house, with my grandparents two doors down and my grandpa's brother Chuck and his family living in the house in between. And whenever I think about winter in Nebraska, I always, at least transiently, think about the beautiful tan-brick fireplace at my grandpa's house.

Grandpa was a bricklayer, and so were his brothers, so all the labor that went into the construction of his house was virtually free. For that reason, if you go into my grandparent's living room, you will see one wall made entirely of brick that would rival any one wall in any home in Omaha. This wall contains the front door, numerous depressions which hold, among other things, a grandfather clock, some pictures, and my grandmother's seasonal decorations, the fireplace itself, an intricate vent above the fireplace, and a large cutout next to the firplace for the storage of a couple days worth of wood. There is also about a seatcushion height ledge that runs the length of the wall that can be used as a shelf for displaying decorations or pictures, or for extra seating as it was used for so many years on Christmas and grandkids' birthdays. It is this fireplace that I think of when I think of someday building a house of my own. I think of my grandpa, out in the blistering cold with his stocking hat, his thick red beard with a few regal strands of gray, and his tan coveralls and overcoat. He would wheel his wheelbarrow down to the disconnected back garage and fill it with firewood once every day or two or three depending on how fast he was going through it. And as soon as he got home from work every day the fire would be lit, and the balance of the evening spent relaxing in close proximity to it. I can honestly say the the only thing that could match the intensity of the cold outside in the Nebraska winter was the warmth inside that house (my cousin Tom may disagree, see below). The labor, tools, and materials used to build the house were those of commercial bricklayers, and the result was a house so well insulated from the outside elements that it was like its own world in there. And with Grandpa making a fire and Grandma making up some stew or bean soup, these images are literally the only reason I even can stand the anticipation of the brutal winter each year.

But in any season, my grandpa was and is the king of taking care of his home. When I think of October, I think of Grandpa out in the back lot raking a ridiculous amount of leaves in his Nebraska sweatshirt with the football game playing on the radio (I actually think he still prefers to listen to rather than watch the games on TV); in the spring there was always some kind of project going on over there; in the summer he would spend literally half the weekend, every weekend taking care of the yard and the pool so we could swim during the week (funny note: he usually would have my mother as an obstacle while vacuuming the pool as she has an insatiable appetite for sunbathing during the summertime).

I feel fortunate to have grown up so close to my grandparents and to still have them just as close now. For me it's hard to imagine Joanna's situation: the last of her grandparents, her grandmother on her mother's side, died in 2004 just before we started dating, and she never really lived in close proximity to any of them, at least not that I've heard about.

As promised, I want to tell a little story about my cousin Tom and his wife Leah, two individuals who probably don't associate with my grandparents' house the intense warmth that I described above. Tom did a year of college at UNL, after which he finished his degree at Iowa Western. His parents lived in Plattsmouth, so to cut out some of his daily drive time and to be a little closer to Leah who lived in Bellevue, he paid a very reasonable rent to my grandparents to stay in their basement. Unfortunately for Tom, who is perpetually cold in the winter anyways, the thermostat controlling the heat in his bedroom and the entire house was located in the living room, just across from the blazing fireplace. The furnace in that house virtually never turned on, so while my grandparents were watching 'Wheel of Fortune' in a toasty 78 degree living room, Tom would be downstairs in bed with a full on ensemble of sweats, stocking hat, mittens, and the whole nine yards, reporting that at times he could literally see his breath. Ahhh, good stuff.