-grandma-

25yrs ago

yes...gator shorts






It’s strange how grandmas seem like they’ve always been Grandmas. I mean I don’t remember mine as anything else…. It might sound simple but she has always been this sweet little old lady. She’s always looked the same and talked the same. She doesn’t send me dollar bills in birthday cards anymore, but it would be weird if she did.
I don’t get to see her much anymore, mainly due to the fact that she is over 2600 miles away. She’s nestled into a cozy senior citizen tower, above an ancient brick street in the outskirts of Pittsburg, Pa. just miles from where I was born. At the age of two I guess I had no choice other than to follow my Dad out west to the land of new beginnings. We Volkswagon-ed it to northern California. Leaving Grandma and Grandpa behind, along with other loved ones, but that’s a whole other story. Daily visits with Grandma now became yearly at the most.
Grandma and Grandpa came out to visit once when I was about 6. I can remember this visit pretty well. There was a strange feeling that I felt when they saw my brother and I playing in my mom’s…… “house?”, at the time she lived in a vacant room of the old Hamm’s Brewery building. It wasn’t really a room, just her part of the old factory; it was a giant space and definitely not what the Grandparents expected. So I think my Mom made up for the strange taste in living quarters by chaperoning them and us boys to San Francisco’s most typical tourist destinations, Chinatown, cable cars, the golden gate, and the best iron on t-shirt shops. I opted for Yoda, my bro got some bare tittied beach babe, Grandpa got #1 Grandpa and Grandma appropriately followed suit with #1 Grandma, all iron metal flake style and totally awesome.
At the time my Grandpa was a diesel mechanic mostly working on large equipment. He worked everyday, smoked everyday, and enjoyed drinking everyday. He spent most of his times with the same people, mostly other workers at his job and friends at the bar. So you can assume he was amidst a pretty big culture shock. He did his best at showing us a good time though. Of course he’d rather my brother and I had been old enough to join him at a local San Francisco watering hole but being so young he settled for giving us hard hats and CAT jackets from the diesel yard where we worked. He watched my brother and I rage around as he pulled on filter-less lucky strikes. My Grandma hated his smoking. Later in life she told me my Grandpa smoked so much, that during the humid summers in PA when grandpa woke up in the morning there would be a nicotine stain on the white sheets surrounding his body. Years later when I was still pretty young we lost him to cancer. He’s gone, the hardhat is gone, the CAT jacket, but fortunately I got his head of hair.
As I got older visits with Grandma became few and far between. She would usually come out and visit every couple years, but as of recent I hadn’t seen her. A certain amount of guilt had started to build up because of this. To make matters worse last summer when I was riding cross country with Ken and Chris, Ken’s Grandma died. He was on the road, far from his current home in Oakland and further from the home of his upbringing, Japan. His grandma was still living there and now she was being put to rest there. Ken has to struggle with the reality that he’s not an American citizen, so in situations like this, he would love to go home to say his goodbyes to his Grandma but he can’t. Well he could, but then they’d never let him back into the country. Seeing Ken go through this made me feel worse about not having seen my Grandma in so long. I thought about the possibility of maybe visiting her on the return ride home, but homesickness was already chasing us out of Brooklyn. So we split west shortly after the Brooklyn Invitational and headed for home. The first day of riding we barely escaped from New York, and only made it to a small campsite as far as New Jersey. The next day we woke up early and headed for Pa. We were doing some good miles and had a couple hundred behind us when my bike started to slow down rapidly. Instantly I thought “great, my motor is seizing” but just as the DMV hand book says about flat tires, I felt “a complete loss of power”, the sketchy part was that it was my front tire and I was going 70mph. Luckily the flat happened next to a truck pull out, so feet dragging on the ground, fists clenched tight to the bars I veered right for the safety of the shoulder. Chris was kind enough to help me with the flat, so after I patched the tube and we put it back on we were back on the road. Not long after the horizon was going orange and darkness was on its way so we headed for gas and to make plans for the night. Here is where things start to get cosmic….. I came out of the gas station and my tire was flat again, so I asked some locals if there was a place to buy a tube. They told me there was a cycle gear right down the road. Whoa. Totally lucky stop; I used the air at the station and filled that tire up all the way, the light was fading quick so the local said, “follow me”, we hauled down there just making it as the tube gave up again. The kid inside said they were closed, but he hooked it up anyway and an hour later I was high on my hawg! After eating cheap chicken wings and drinking Ying Ling at the local sports bar we bunked up in town. When we woke up we decided to avoid the toll road that we had gotten stuck on the day before. We hit the local roads and headed for a more appropriate highway. The guilt in my heart was heavy knowing I was fairly close to my Grandma and that I wasn’t gonna stop. It felt like a selfish idea to visit her while traveling with others and I thought we were hours away from her house. But man when we popped out on this one road my little kid memory kicked in…. I clearly recognized the road and the old brick buildings, we were riding along the Allegeheny and I knew this part of the river. A series of wrong turns had put us right smack in the middle of Pittsburg. Wrong turn across a bridge, then another bridge, then holy shit a tunnel. I knew this tunnel clearly from the back seat of my Grandma’s car. It had been over 20 years but I knew we were getting really close. Randomly I took the next possible exit, pulled over and killed the bike. When I looked up I almost fell over; the sign in front of me had a huge white arrow and pointed to the name of my Grandma’s little neighborhood. I had no choice, no weak excuse, it was in the cards, ….. I was going to see Grandma! At that moment I decided that if these dudes didn’t want to support this visit I was more than prepared to go home solo. I told them “ hey I’m super close to my Grandmas house and I gotta go see her”. There was a weird silence and then Ken said, “ cool man do you mind if I go with you?”. Chris followed along to Grandmas house too. Like lots of older folks she went from home, to a duplex, to a smaller apartment and now to a senior living apartment. I called her totally out of the blue from downstairs and they sent me up to her place. She greeted me with a “look what the cat dragged in”, it was so awesome. We hung out for little bit drank sodas or “pops” and I told her about our trip. It was a brief visit but it was priceless. It has become one of the favorite memories from the trip. It was pure destiny and it was totally beautiful. Grandma doesn’t have the shirt anymore but she still is my -#1 Grandma-!!

grandma summer 2010

ken nagahara photo