The Sound Age Makes

When I was seven years old, my grandpa dragged out a muddy, lime-green kayak from his garage, strapped me into a moldy lifevest and pushed me, fearfully gripping the sharp plastic edges of the tippy device, into an alligator-filled swamp in his backyard. He stood on the bank holding a yellow rope attached to the tip of the kayak, watching me drift farther and farther away. Seeing his satisfaction, I halfheartedly paddled to kindle the acute light in his soul, which desired solely to pass on any useful skill to the only granddaughter interested in learning from him. The other girls in the family spent their summer tanning on the beach or playing with dolls in the attic, unwilling to try and relate to my grandpa, which was understandable.  He is an old, very deaf man who spends his days playing solitaire on the iPad and fixing BLT sandwiches with Diet Coke on ice for my grandma, who is in bed with arthritis.  But at the time, I pitied him for the loneliness of old age I assumed caught up to everyone as they began to die, and that pity put me in a kayak. 

The salty water sloshing in the bottom of the boat made my legs itch, and I could feel the sun burning my shoulders. I was miserable.

“This is so fun!” I yelled at him through the deafening screech of cicadas. He gave me a wide smile, which looked funny because his teeth were so white compared to his dark skin, browner and wrinklier than old leather from all the time he spent outside. Good, I thought. I’ve made him happy.  

My grandpa was the only person I knew who never complained about all the mosquitoes that nipped at your ankles when you walked across the lawn or how smothering the humidity felt after two minutes outside or the jellyfish teeming in the ocean right at this time in August. He loved nature and the outdoors, so as a rite of passage he would try periodically to teach these hobbies to his maturing grandchildren. As his hearing worsened, making it hard for him to teach us through conversation, lessons taught by example were all my grandpa had left to give.

My first time in the kayak watching my grandpa stand in the thick, itchy grass of the bank as I drifted away created an impenetrable bubble around him, as if physical distance had prevented my opinions and those of my family, and of the conflicting cultures of my New York upbringing and southern roots, from reaching him. I didn’t see a man on that grassy bank who went to scotch night on Tuesdays and came home drunk or almost crashed the car with my best friend in it on the way home from dinner because he was tired. He didn’t look like the ailing man who picked fights with my dad over politics at dinner, or the pathetic husband my grandmother constantly scoffed at for forgetting which type of sandwich she asked him to make at lunch. He didn't look like the man who threw fits over losing at tennis or couldn’t understand social cues at dinner parties when sensitive topics came up. He didn’t look like my deaf grandpa we all screamed at day and night, frustrated and annoyed. He didn’t even look that old. He just looked like a man.

My grandpa lived what most would call the American Dream. His parents came to America from Positano on a boat during the Industrial Revolution and opened a grocery shop in Brooklyn. When they had their first son, they named him Dominicano Cannaciola—Don Canna for short. Don Canna for American. The grocery store was successful. My grandpa spent the long, lazy summers of his childhood on the shores of Long Island Sound, shucking oysters and shooting birds. He went to college and studied finance. When he was twenty, he met my grandma at a bar. They danced and two months later got married. My grandpa got a job in a bank and moved the family down to a suburb in North Carolina where they could properly raise a family in the 1970s. Every summer he took his daughters to the sound and showed them the things he did as a boy. I guess this was the birth of his desire to pass on, to transcend death with legacy. The girls grew up and got married to men in finance like my grandpa and had kids. These are the only facts anyone has ever found worth mentioning to me about his life. 

From that day forward kayaking was our thing. Unlike the grandchildren who came before me —mostly boys—my grandfather didn't show me how to shoot a BB gun at empty Coke cans or steer his camouflage duck hunting boat through the marsh’s pluff mud banks because he didn’t think those activities were interesting for girls. Of course, if I had insisted, he probably would have shown me how to do them. But I didn’t insist and he never showed me. We didn’t talk much either—he couldn’t hear and the knowledge he wanted to share about reading tides and duck breeds—was of little interest to me. The only thing I could really do with him every summer was paddle in that dreaded lime-green kayak as he gave me pointers from the bank, holding that frayed yellow rope. After my arms were so tired I couldn’t paddle another foot, he would pull me in, sending perfect ripples through the murky green water and drag the kayak onto shore, then help me out. 

As the years passed by, every summer when my family visited my grandparents, the first thing I would say to my grandpa was how excited I was to go kayaking.  I did this to please him and because we had absolutely nothing else to talk about. When I turned twelve, I was deemed capable of taking on more challenging venues than the backyard swamp. These trips became tradition. Before I even opened my eyes in the morning, he had loaded the rusty old Ford with two kayaks so we could drive to the marsh and paddle as the sun rose. The ride there would be mostly silent. I might say I was excited, to which he would say, “What, Honey?” and then I’d say it louder and the conversation ended. But it was never awkward. Just quiet, just the light hum of the car air conditioner. I suppose we both sought refuge in the silence, as speaking only highlighted how little we had in common. In the quiet we could remain connected to each other but completely removed from the anguish of voices—the scoffs from Grandma and political discussions, the sighs and passive-aggressive comments from aunts and daughters, the drunken conversations in the evenings that always escalated too quickly. They could not reach us. By the time we actually got the kayaks in the marsh, I’d be exhausted. Always at least twenty feet behind my grandpa and always frustrated with how the salty water stung my scrawny legs. Still, we relished the fact that there was no need for conversation. Once we made it far enough out to where the ocean was so clear you could see the sapphire sky reflect on its surface, as though you were paddling through clouds, I began to understand the sanctuary my grandpa found in nature. The sanctuary he found in silence. 

The summer before my senior year of high school, I never woke up to two kayaks balanced perfectly in the trunk of the Ford. 

“They’re too heavy,” my grandpa said. “You’re gonna have to help me.” After a half hour of tugging and maneuvering, when the car was finally all packed, we embarked on the silent drive to the marsh. That day as my grandpa tried to push my kayak off the dock and into the water, a task he used to do with precision and ease, the boat immediately capsized. I treaded water, screaming, 

“Papa, help me!” but he couldn't. He did not have the strength to jump in and untangle me or pull the boat back to the dock. The bungee cord of the kayak got wrapped around my neck from all my panic, threatening to drown me as I gagged on salt water. My grandpa stood frozen, helplessly watching me. Flailing, I finally pulled myself onto the rotted dock, blood dripping down my barnacle-cut legs as tears rolled down my cheeks. 

“Alright, Honey, ready to go in?” he asked me, as though he hadn’t almost witnessed me drown at his mercy. 

As I paddled behind him that humid August day, watching him struggle to push the heavy water away from side to side, I realized this was probably one of the last times I would be sitting in that lime-green kayak watching as he paddled farther and farther away from the noise. To a place he could no longer hear the desires, the shortcomings, or the ambiguities that seem to call out to us from the beginning of life to the end. Where the only sound was the harmonious blare of the cicadas. I wondered if he could hear them.