The

Grampy

Tales and Stories

by

TB Murdoch

Credits

Mark Shippy, I don’t know how to start. You ramrodded this book, never flagged in support of it and didn’t stint with either your sense of direction or sense of humour. Thank you.

Bruce Murdoch: If I may be allowed, I wish to say I think Canada’s Alice Munro is the greatest English-language short story writer on this planet.

brucemurdochmusic@gmail.com

I wish to thank “The Voice” in Hinton. They are excellent people who invented a newspaper to give a town-slant to what folks read. They published two of these stories in mildly abridged versions. The names: Grampy and the Radio and Grampy and the Television.  Thank you.

Bruce

Copyright 2011 – Thomas Bruce Murdoch

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be  reproduced in any  form or

distributed in any form without permission of

the author.

Produced by Amaranth Publishing

www.amaranthpublishing.com

Table Of Contents

Preface

Grampy and the Television

Preface

A Note to the Reader

The Grampy Tales and Stories have been a labour of love for me based on an abiding affection for both Nanny and Grampy. The stories have been filtered through an old memory and there are more than a few adventures that I thought readers would find unbelievable, so I omitted them from this narrative. Any historical inaccuracies are mine.

The facts as they pertain to the stories are as I recall them. A few names have been purposely altered and a few unintentionally altered because as I implied about my memory, it’s aging with me.

I doubt many people still living will remember my grandmother or grandfather, but people who did know them liked them both. The stories are true--except where they obviously are not. I’ll leave it to you to decide which is which.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Mark Shippy, the owner and operator of Amaranth Publishing. He and I met on-line because of some events in the mid to late 1960s when we were both errant musicians and even more errant teenagers. Things led to other things and the production of this E-book is one result; a solid friendship is another. Mark, thank you sincerely for helping me accomplish one of my life’s goals.

Thomas Bruce Murdoch

PS As with the songs I write and occasionally record, I dedicate this work to Justine Murdoch and her older sister Corrina Murdoch, Eric Fevang and their daughter Julia. They will always be the angels in my heart.

TBM

Ormstown, Quebec, Canada

Grampy and the Television

The television wasn't the first one on the block in the early 1950s, but it was the first one for my grandparents. Nanny was thrilled to have it, and so was Grampy. It was brought by an Eaton's delivery truck, and two men hauled it up the outside stairs and into the living room on Le Caron Street. And as with most electrical devices in my grandparents' apartment, it developed problems the very second it crossed the threshold of the front door. It was barely plugged in and turned on when the screen went funny. Nanny said the picture was fine, absolutely fine, but my grandfather's eye could detect a certain fuzziness in much the same way his ear could determine that something wasn't quite right with the radio. There was no question about it according to Grampy. The TV needed adjustment. Pointedly, Nanny didn't say a word when she left the room. Left may be an understatement by a few orders of magnitude, like referring to a nuclear power plant meltdown as a minor environmental incident. She departed for the kitchen, leaving behind Grampy, me, the television and a certain indefinable je ne sais quoi. It was something akin to a Siberian winter tinged with--well, let me put it this way: it was quite chilly in the living room!

In an effort to improve reception, Grampy fiddled with the rabbit ears on the brand-new black and white RCA television. He poked, twisted and turned every knob and dial he could locate in every conceivable permutation of combinations, and by process of elimination eventually determined that the problem had to be internal--maybe mechanical, possibly electrical. When Grampy went for his tool bag my grandmother walked out of the house. Walked in this instance is meant to describe a departure that could have been measured on the Richter scale. She closed the door. And closed in this case means hard-of-hearing people within a two block radius were phoning radio stations to ask what the loud bang was and were they in any immediate danger.

Jack Walsh loved Mary Walsh as she did him: devotedly and completely. However, the intrinsic mysteries held by electronic appliances and devices were as shiny lures to starving fish or bright streetlights to wandering moths. And, there was a problem. You see, that was the first television set Grampy had ever been close to, and he wasn't actually entirely sure of what he was doing. But one could no more fault Grampy for wanting to improve that television set than one could blame van Gogh for creating great works of visual art or Beethoven for composing beautiful, memorable music. He was never one to be deterred by the unknown, but Nanny was not at all happy, and that was a known quantity in the equation. So, Grampy was racing the clock, and as his apprentice, I was racing it with him.

The clock itself was a contentious issue in the household. It had a really loud alarm, what with two large noisy bells on the top and a very rapid striker, and it bounced around noisily when it went off. However, the fundamental problem was that it didn't keep perfect time. In fact, it was downright unpredictable. Grampy and I had adjusted the tension of the mainspring. It took us what seemed like an eternity to rewind the darn thing and get it back into the clock after it leapt out of confinement on its own accord when we took the clock apart. While the alarm could be trusted to go off, it couldn't be trusted to go off at the given time for which it was set. No, that's not right. It could be trusted to go off at the time for which it was set, but it was a series of mathematical calculations requiring the genius of Sir Isaac Newton to figure out how to set the clock so that the wakeup hour, time and alarm all converged simultaneously. That made for some rude surprises at odd hours of the night. Nanny would put it in a drawer or cupboard during the day when Grampy was away at work. She had really good nerves, but that alarm certainly put them to the test. The clock was always running erratically. So, it was right for a moment or two each year, but that occurred only by chance.

Light travels at exactly 299,792.458 kilometers per second in a vacuum. This is a generally accepted fact that I have been tempted to check with The Hoover Company, but I have always thought they'd find the inquiry to be flippant. I do know that had light's speed been measured using my grandparents' clock, it would vary from second to second, hour to hour, day to day and year to year, thus throwing our planet, solar system, Milky Way galaxy and the whole known universe into utter and absolute chaos. Neither Grampy nor I had given that any serious consideration when we adjusted the mainspring, although I'm not sure that the potential dangers would have turned us away from our appointed task. If you are reading this and pondering plausible reasons as to why you are late for work, I implore you not to tell your boss that Grampy and the kid caused the problem. Your boss won't know who we are, anyway. Instead, seek resolution in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle or the vacillation of sound in various mediums like rock and roll or Johann Sebastian Bach fugues, the plaintive cry of a timorous ptarmigan on the frozen Arctic tundra, or the gasping guttural gurgles that come from the tap when you open it after a lengthy absence. Your excuse doesn't have to make sense, but it does have to sound like it could make sense. Telling your employer anything about the speed of light, mainsprings and alarm clocks will likely just get you in deeper trouble. However, be not dismayed, because there is a growth industry for someone who needs extra income or a new job. Start a company called 'Alibis R Us' and sell reasons for this and that to wayward employees. Here, I'm thinking specifically of those people who are habitually tired on Monday mornings and subsequently late for work; and those unfortunate forgetful souls who have lost track of how many times their various relatives passed away, and those miscreant ne'er-do-wells who, thinking they have finally managed to elude a life of disgusting debauchery, then bring further attention and shame to their wretched seedy reputations when they awaken to find themselves holding publicly-elected office, despite having no recollection of signing the necessary nomination papers or delivering the expected grandiloquent acceptance speech. Clearly, the latter category of employees will provide thousands of writers with full-time occupations. But, I seem to be getting away from the story here.

We were somewhat taken aback by the label pasted on the rear of the TV. It was a broadside of warnings and imprecations about possible injury or even death by electrocution were the uninformed to venture therein. Seeing none of the uninformed about, Grampy took off the back of the television set and we stared inside. Neither JRR Tolkien nor JK Rowling ever imagined a world like that. Tubes, tubes and more tubes. They positively glowed--as did my grandfather and I. Grampy made note that all the tubes were lit, and he wisely decided to unplug the television before we removed any from the innards of the machine. We took 'em all out and examined each one, individually. And then we tried to put 'em all back in, each one, individually. Grampy got that far-away look on his face, the look that let me know we had difficulties. The TV wouldn't work at all. By my later calculations, there were scads of possible combinations we could have used to reinsert all the tubes, but there was only one correct way. Ever a man of action given to the careful, complete consideration and contemplation of any problem with which he was faced, Grampy decided to tell me about the time he hung out with Sir Walter Ralegh in England. Incidentally, that's not a misspelling. Walter actually preferred his name spelled that way, and out of deference to his memory I shall keep with his wishes.

Grampy was vague as to when, where and how he and Ralegh had met. I know that my grandfather was staying in England with a fellow named Bill in Stratford-upon-Avon. His visit had to do with apiarian pursuits and some creative writing that the author was stuck on. Bill was working on something called a soliloquy that I think had to do with the creatures Noah took on the ark some years earlier. He thought that there were swarms of bees taken onboard, and Grampy held that there was only a single pair. Essentially, the question was one of two bees or not two bees. They had a friendly yet heated discussion about it. Bill told my grandfather it might be nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune than to take up arms against a sea of troubles, but Grampy thought that by opposing, one might end them. I don't know to this day if they ever reached a mutually satisfactory conclusion to the discussion. Bill had also asked my grandfather's opinion as to an appropriate setting for the story. Grampy figured that having it take place across the water in mainland Europe was good and would allow pirates to get into the action if Bill could create a reason to get some of the characters onto a ship back to England. Grampy was big on pirates because he had spent some time with them in the Caribbean. He then confided to me that the law firm of Rosen, Crantz, Guild and Stern had taken Bill for a substantial sum of money on a theatre production he had written earlier in his career, and he intended to have them vicariously killed off in the play he was working on. If I ever visit the place Bill lived, I'll ascertain the facts at the public library. I don't think it was a bestseller, but I could be mistaken. I regret not remembering the title, but how many playwrights named Bill could have come from the same hamlet?

Sir Walter was an interesting, complicated and misunderstood man according to Grampy. I heard that some historians have tried to make the case that Queen Elizabeth and Walt were 'sharing a few moments' now and then. I don't think that's very likely. All you have to do is look at any portrait of Ralegh to know that he didn't seem to have much to smile about. If he and the Queen had been, you know, he would have had a grin from ear to ear (or at least a smirk visible through his beard and mustache). However, I think maybe that type of discussion is best left for another time.

Walt often sailed the seas, and Grampy said he was fortunate in gaining Elizabeth's assistance with ships and letters giving him access to lands in North America that weren't already taken by some other country. He is the guy who took potatoes and tobacco back to England. He also claimed and named countryside for Elizabeth. It was a fortunate turn of events, because it meant that the cigarette manufacturers who sold Virginia tobacco didn't have to get their packages redesigned and reprinted. Walt had done Elizabeth a good turn and made her a household name, although I think that referring to her as The Virgin Queen tells people more than they have any need to know, and it also wasn't true. On one occasion when the London streets were unusually muddy, he borrowed my grandfather's cloak and placed it on the wet ground to allow the Queen a mud-free passage to her carriage. She thought Walt had used his own garment, and she was impressed by his gallantry. My Grampy was too much a gentleman to say what had really happened, and Walt seems to have let the facts slip away in the fog of time. But, I know that my grandfather didn't begrudge him his moment, because only a few years later Sir Walter Ralegh was thrown in jail for conspiring against the king who reigned after Elizabeth, and in 1618 he was beheaded. Ralegh's wife kept his head with her for twenty-nine years, something he could have done for himself if he'd been a little more careful with his tongue. Eventually, he was literally reunited when his wife passed away in 1647, and Sir Walter's embalmed head was buried with the rest of Sir Walter at St Margaret's Church next to Westminster Abbey.

After Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603, the English needed a monarch. Scotland gave them James VI. He then became James I of England, thus providing the country to the south of Hadrian's Wall with a ruler and concomitantly lending new meaning to the expression, give me five. Grampy said that James was a good king as kings go, but he wouldn't have wanted him coaching a boys' swim team. I wondered how a king could find time to coach any kind of team, but Grampy didn't explain. I was thirty-six before I found out why. It's another little snippet of information that's left out of most history books, and that's a shame. All too often what they don't put in is more interesting than what they do. For example, I know that my students were more fascinated with Sir John A Macdonald's bar bills than they ever had been with his Parliamentary addresses. The exception is the one in which he vomited a four-day consumption of alcohol onto the House of Common's floor and remarked that it was all he had to say in response to a personal verbal attack by Sir Wilfred Laurier, the leader of the opposition. Sir John A Macdonald was our first Prime Minister, and my grandfather said nobody knew he drank until they saw him sober once on a Tuesday. Many people fondly refer to him as Canada's drinking problem. In truth, had he been cremated it would have taken days to extinguish the blaze. He was from Scotland, too. Abruptly, Grampy and I were taken from our meanderings and brought back to our predicament by a knock at the door.

The next-door neighbour, Mr Clark, required assistance with his television. He didn't have my grandfather's skills with electronics, and he seemed in a quandary. In what was a most fortuitous coincidence, his new set was the same make and model as the one we were fixing in the living room, and he just needed to have the rabbit ears connected. Every now and then, fortune smiles on the deserving. Grampy drew a diagram of where all the tubes were in Mr Clark's RCA, and subsequently we were able to effect the replacement of the tubes in ours. It was a glorious, triumphant moment of great relief when the picture came on. Nanny returned shortly thereafter and she seemed quite surprised but very happy. Grampy and I never again worked on the TV when Nanny was at home. And here is the crux of this story.

My grandfather was my dearest friend and closest companion. He shared his life with me and took the place of my absent father. When I had problems, Grampy helped me think about them and solve them. When I needed direction or guidance, he seemed to know, always. I absolutely adored him, and to this day I weigh the personal attributes of all other people against the mettle of his character. He was not a perfect man, and God knows he could drive a person to distraction, but he was my Grampy. We spent countless hours over the course of the years fixing the television. I would hold the mirror while he fiddled with the back of the TV. It was something we did together that was very special and meaningful to me, and it taught me lessons I could never have learned on my own: Lessons about helping, figuring things out, understanding the words people use, manners and speaking.

My grandfather took ill. He had black lung caused by his coal mining days, and cancer caused by the cigarettes he smoked. I knew he was sick, but I had no idea how sick. I had gone to him so, so many times in my youth when I was misunderstood or troubled, lost or confused, alone or hurt. I could no more conceive of a life without him than I could conceive of a universe without God. And at the age of sixty-three, I can feel tears in my eyes as I try to write about the time Grampy came to me.

The living room was silent. The shades were drawn. The television screen was dark. I floated across the floor, stood beside my grandfather's chair and stared at the TV. I didn't know what I was doing there; I just knew it was where I had to be. Time evaporated. How much or how little went by I have no way of knowing. A mist formed beside the television we had repaired together so often. My grandfather's face appeared from the nothingness, and he smiled at me with a peace, tranquility, sadness and compassion I have only ever ascribed to beings of kindness and angels from the other world. And I knew then what Grampy had come to tell me. I awoke in my bed with the most terrible chilling anguish a human being can experience. I spoke with no one, and two months later the unthinkable came to pass.

The day of my grandfather's death is still a dark, cloudy and shrouded mystery to me fifty-one years later. All I can recall is saying no, over and over. The math on that shocks me. I estimate that I said no about once a second for almost fourteen hours. After more than fifty thousand repetitions of the word, Grampy was still dead and I remember absolutely nothing else about August 3, 1960. I was twelve years old at the time.

Hyperlexia is a little-known syndrome today. It didn't even have a name when I was young. The syndrome is deemed to be on the autism spectrum, and indeed hyperlexic children and adults often display autistic-like behaviours. I exhibited those behaviours as a child because I was (and am) hyperlexic. After Grampy's death I said nothing to anyone for months, and were it not for the dream I experienced before my grandfather died, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind, heart or soul that I would have remained in a speechless, catatonic state for the rest of my life.

In my late twenties on the streets of Montreal, I struck two men hard and repeatedly because they had been making fun of a young teenager who was clearly, visibly mentally ill. At the time, I had every intention of using my open hands and closed fists to beat them into senselessness. I wanted to hurt them and then I wanted to kill them. Something made me stop, and today I thank God for that. What I did permanently changed me, because what I became in those moments--certainly less than a half minute--truly frightened me. I will not under any circumstance tolerate or allow the ridicule of people with mental or physical challenges. Thankfully, I since found effective non-violent ways to deal with the other situations I have encountered. You see, as a child I was one of those people who gets teased and laughed at, and I know there is nothing at all fun or funny about either the ridicule or the challenges.

Television and the thousands of programs available have made it easy to access information, much of it inaccurate or slanted. I have seen Sir Walter Ralegh, Bill, Queen Elizabeth, James I and Sir John A Macdonald in vivid and bright colour; I have heard them talk in lively surround sound. They were nothing like the real people my grandfather introduced me to when I was a child, usually when the old black and white was in need of adjustment, which so often it was on the days Nanny went shopping. I suppose we are fortunate to have such progress, but I fear it infringes, limits and shapes the boundaries of our humanity, so the last time my television needed repair I didn't bother calling the company. It sits today with a silent, empty screen. Resting on the cabinet beside the scale model of the original Ark Royal is a copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and next to Bill's plays and poetry is a mirror in which sometimes I see the reflection of a younger man who has his grandfather's ears and wears his grandfather's smile. I love you so very much, Grampy, and I have never stopped missing you.

The End

Purchasing

The

Grampy

Tales and Stories

You can purchase and download the eight stories of The Grampy Tales and Stories by TB Murdoch for Nook, Kindle and in epub format by going to:

www.amaranthpublishing.com/grampy.html

Copyright 2011 – Thomas Bruce Murdoch – All Rights Reserved

Table of Contents

Title page

Credits

Preface

Grampy and the Television

Purchasing The Grampy Tales and Stories