trotter at denison

Editor's note: I'd written this up a week or so ago, but didn't know whether to publish it here or not. I think it's OK now. – Paul


trotter at denison, originally uploaded by pr9000.

Some things write themselves; others require work. This is a bit of both. I've been telling myself the story in quiet moments -- in the shower, driving to Kroger, taking Trotter for a walk. There hasn't been a moment away from it. How it all fits together is really beyond me at the moment, but somehow it all does in my mind. I hope it does on the page as well.

I'll start with the facts:

Edward Rinkes, my grandfather, died last Thursday.

It's the damnedest sentence to write. It doesn't do justice to what happened -- show me the obit that ever has -- and yet it's remarkably accurate in its clinical, emotionless summary. On Thursday afternoon, Ed Rinkes called the Martins Ferry police and reported a shooting at his address. He then walked into the living room, laid down on the floor, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

When I'm in a forgiving mood (which isn't often lately), I'd say this was the banal, physical culmination 22 years after the emotional death he suffered when my grandmother, Ruth, passed from a long bout with cancer. I'm not exaggerating; on Ruth's tombstone, he put his name next to hers, which is a common practice when a spouse dies. Normally, you'd see the deceased's name and dates, and the survivor's name, with only the year of birth.

But Ed Rinkes put his date of death in stone -- exactly three days after Ruth's. Last week was just an afterthought to him. To the rest of the family, it's all we can think about.

***

You'll note the cute picture at the top of this post. We took Trotter back home with us. We've always wanted him to see his grandparents' house and huge back yard, and he certainly did have fun. To call him spoiled is to call water kinda wet. Trotter lives the life.

On the ride back we had to make a pit stop, coincidentally at the Ohio 37 exit, which leads straight to Granville, home of my alma mater, Denison University. Amina decided we should take Trotter to Denison, to get an education like his dad. He had a great time, though the first thing he did was take a dump on the quad outside Slayter Hall. Like father, like son, I suppose.

We played fetch on the academic quad, the commons area behind Slayter (which is totally new to me) and in front of Swasey Chapel. We had lots of water, we sniffed all the mulched trees and in about an hour, Trotter had as much fun as a dog could have on a perfectly manicured college campus.

I only realized later the irony behind the timing of our visit. I wouldn't have made it to Denison had Ed Rinkes not given my parents a gift of money that they, in turn, dedicated to paying tuition. If it weren't for Ed Rinkes, I never would have afforded a private college.

It used to be known as "a Baptist college of the liberal arts," but the sign at the base of campus had been changed in 2006. Had my grandmother Ruth lived a few more years, she'd have told me all about the Baptist legacy of Denison. She'd spent a week of every summer at Denison, attending the Ohio Women's Baptist Convention. I found a program in her desk at the house. She ate in Curtis West and Huffman, she stayed in Shepardson, she attended events at Swasey ... I never knew this until after she passed.

Something else I never knew: John, Josh and Adam -- my main circle of friends at Denison -- all had grandmothers who attended the same convention. I'm sure their grandmothers knew mine. Adam's mother actually attended my church when she was a little girl; I'm sure my dad pulled her pigtails or somesuch. And even spookier: Rev. Sedgwick, who founded my church way back in the early 1800s, helped create the Granville Literary and Theological Institution, which ... well, I don't need to finish that sentence.

Denison was in my stars. But I never would have realized it had Ed Rinkes not made it possible.

***

So what, you say. Big deal -- your grandpa gave you money to go to college. I'd agree; normally it isn't newsworthy ... except that he wasn't known for magnanimity. Or kindness. Or sensitivity. Or sense of humor.

Basically, Ed wasn't well liked, even within the family.

He wasn't particularly fond of people in general, especially visitors to his house. After Ruth died, he put up a hand-stenciled sign that ordered visitors to "treat this house as you would your neighbor's wife -- look all you want, but do not touch." He was disliked by the families on both sides of his house, and his obsession with one led to a rather embarrassing brush with the police. In his suicide note, he mentioned his "rotten neighbors" and failing health, as though the two were equivalent burdens on his frail psyche.

He didn't seem to be a caring parent or grandparent. Mom told me this story just Sunday, claiming that it perfectly summed up what Ed Rinkes was all about. Apparently, I was just a young boy when this happened:

On a trip home from visiting with our relatives in Cleveland, I asked Ed if he would give me something that he had -- could have been a trinket, or a toy. "Paul," he said to me, "I love you so much I'd give you the sweat off my balls."

The sweat off my balls. To Ed, that was as loving as it got. I helped him put together a metal shed he'd bought at Sears. I must have been 10 or 11, old enough to know what I was doing but not old enough to do it with Ed. We were assembling some part of the shed, and it called for some contortions that ended up with both of us using our left hands to complete the task. He said something about being "no goddamned good" at using his left hand -- "even for jacking off," he said. I had no idea what "jacking off" was, but I could tell that (1) I could not do it left handed, and (2) I probably shouldn't repeat that to grandma.

If you want to hear the harrowing stories, the ones that will leave you breathless and squirming, my dad or uncle would have to fill you in. I know some of them in outline form, but they're dad's stories, not mine -- thank God -- and from the outlines I know, I'm not terribly eager to hear the details. Suffice it to say that he was a few millimeters away from beating the boys with coat hangers. And maybe he did that, too, for all I know.

He was obsessed with possessions -- not in a materialistic way, though as a child of the Depression he hoarded with the best of his generation. He was obsessed with keeping things, his orderly, OCD-addled mind noting the color, size and general condition of anything he happened to let you borrow. Make no mistake, if Ed Rinkes "gave" you something, he was merely allowing you to borrow it. Twenty years later, he'd cock his head, squint through one eye and say "Remember that toaster I gave you in 1988? Where is it?" And you'd better have an answer. "If you don't want it anymore, don't throw it away -- give it to me." He'd take it, fix it and ...

Well, we knew he kept everything he ever fixed. We didn't know the extent of it until he died and we finally were allowed to see the house that had been closed off since November 1986.

***

859 Seabrights Lane is a narrow, gray house with a hill for a front yard on a street that always seemed a bit shabbier than the rest of the shabby town in which it was located. Every house needs a coat of paint or some more attentive landscaping. I'm sure it wasn't always that way, but I'm sure Martins Ferry was a nicer town when men could find jobs at the steel plants that still mark the shoreline of the Ohio River.

I know Grandma Ruth kept the house as nice as she could, and it was a shock to see how Ed had transformed and twisted it. Gone were the little feminine touches, replaced with the stenciled messages (noted above) and paintings done from photographs of Ruth, Ruth and Ed and ... well, the one that freaked me out the most was a scene he had painted not long after her death. I don't remember the details, except that Jesus was greeting Ruth in heaven in one corner. This was a few months after she died. Not only was it in poor taste, it was poorly done as well, which to my young and egotistical mind was the worse of the offenses.

Despite Ed's years of chain-smoking unfiltered Camels with the windows shut, the house retained its trademark smell, and I'm not ashamed to say it made me smile when I walked into the house last week. I smiled, but not too broadly, because the house brings back odd memories for me -- you want the memories of your grandparents to be happy ones, and I must say, when I walk into my Grandma Ethel's house, even to this day I'm bouncy. It feels like home to me, safe and inviting and warm. That Pop doesn't live there anymore makes it bittersweet, but that's never my first though. I'm always happy to go into Grandma's house.

Ed's house, though, is different. Let me tell you a bit about it:

The house had no real bathroom -- just a toilet, sink and stall shower in the basement, next to the coal furnace that had been converted to gas in the 1960s. The shower stall had one cool thing: Ed put a speaker in there, so that you could listen to records played in the living room above while you showered. But it wasn't a bathroom, just part of the basement. We slept on the second floor, and Grandma Ruth had a galvanized white pail she used to "piddle" into in the night. This seemed normal to me for years.

Ruth was given the living room, kitchen and one bedroom to make hers. Ed had run of the rest of the house. The sun porch, just above the coal cellar, had a small zone where we put our toys, but we never went into the second bedroom upstairs, never dreamed of going into the attic, and only went into the basement because it had the toilet.

And yet the basement always fascinated me. You had to walk past Ed's spot at the kitchen table to get to the basement door, which was like running past Checkpoint Charlie in West Berlin. If you were granted access, you quickly moved forward. As you walked down the steep stairs, you saw glass two liter bottles, stripped of their labels and filled with water that had to be 10 years old when I was a boy. At the foot of the stairs was a metal cabinet filled with dozens of cans of food, labels all facing outward, organized by food type. You made the left turn into the "play" part of the basement, with an old ringer washing machine and a second fridge lining the walls. I was granted a small space to play with my toys, but one of Ed's workbenches was in this area, and I didn't dare go near it.

Walking down the "hall" toward the bathroom, old Victrolas competed for space on the shelves with cigar boxes full of watch and clock parts, massive rolls of newspapers as yellow as the many packages of Honeycomb cereal Grandma kept around for me and Beth. If you weren't careful you butted up against the piping hot arms of the furnace, which was probably 12 feet in diameter, ducts jutting like kudzu throughout the basement.

When the hallway ended at the gas dryer, you turned right, into the aforementioned "bathroom" area. When you sat on the toilet, you stared straight into the gated door of the furnace. It was nice and toasty back there, and I always marveled at "Rinky-Dink's Perma-Cal," a calendar Ed built that required him to adjust the individual days that hung off hobby hooks. It, too, featured stenciled numbers and letters and was actually quite ingenious. I found it down there on Sunday, and it made me sad to see.

There was a coal cellar, but I never went in there, because it was dark and had cobwebs. I had seen that episode of Gilligan's Island with the giant, hairy spider, and I was convinced its cousin lived in the coal cellar. Besides, it was just a bunch of tools and old lawn mowers.

The house is sad -- you can tell that a sad man with a sad life lived there, all alone.

***

After Ruth died, Ed "took over" the house and declared whole sections off limits to us. This didn't help my grieving process, and I didn't take her death too well anyway -- she passed my freshman year of high school, the week of the OSU-Michigan game, and I don't recall much at all of that or my sophomore year. It's all suppressed, I guess. But I think OSU won the game.

The first thing I did upon entering the house last week: explore. I went into every room that had been banned, poked in every closet and desk drawer. It took me a few minutes to realize that, finally, I didn't have to put every thing back exactly where I'd found it -- Ed wasn't there to terrorize me if I didn't. I started leaving things in totally different rooms, just because I could, and that felt really good to me.

I felt like I was claiming what had been taken from me. I'd like to think this is the last piece of a puzzle I've been putting together since 1985.