Family Secrets
Sometimes secrets of a person’s life are revealed only after that person dies. This story of our grandfather came to my sister, Jeanie when we were kids on a family vacation on the oldest island in Hawaii, the Garden Island of Kauai.
Tucked away at the end of a hidden grassy road in the Koke’e mountains, Waineke Lodge cost a dollar a night for local Congregational preachers and their families in the 1970s. The enchanted red cabin, surrounded by tall grass, pine and banana passion fruit trees, had no electricity, but featured cold showers and a Franklin stove to keep the living room warm on winter nights. My dad was the pastor at Koloa Union Church so our family often took advantage of this rustic getaway on the northwest side of Kauai.
My three younger sisters and I would gather every night in front of a crackling fire from twigs and branches we had gathered in the dark forest around the cabin. A humble meal of chili and rice tasted like the best meal we’d ever eaten, hungry as we were in the island mountain wilderness, far from our parsonage home in Koloa on the sunny south side of the island.
After our dessert of milk and sugar poured over juicy blackberries picked along the road to Kalalau Valley Lookout, dad would bring out The Hobbit and read passages to us about Bilbo hiking up the mountain. We’d always laugh whenever he’d deepen his voice and slowly pronounce, the…mountain.
One night after story time, we kids slept on the floor by the fire because the bedrooms were too cold.
Unbeknownst to the rest of us, my sister, Jeanie woke in the middle of the night from the sound of the rocking chair creaking by the Franklin stove. At first, she thought it was our father reading by the fire, but then she noticed it was an older man smoking a pipe. He smiled at my sister and kept rocking. Jeanie froze with fear, staring at him until he vanished.
The next morning when Dad and Mom came into the living room to rouse us for breakfast, Jeanie told us she saw an old man in the rocking chair during the night. We were all shocked and couldn’t believe it. She said he looked like our Grandpa Al, my father’s dad. Our grandpa had died in the late 1960s from stomach cancer. Dad was amused by my sister’s story, privately brushing it off as a dream.
“What did he look like?” dad encouraged. “He was smiling and smoking a pipe,” Jeanie said.
“A pipe?” Dad muttered, tears welling up in his eyes.
“What’s wrong, Dad?” I asked.
“Your Grandpa Al was a simple man and thought pipe smokers were rich and arrogant, but he liked smoking a pipe, so he did it in secret. Only a few people ever knew he did and I was one of them.”
David Mampel is a caregiver, former minister, semi-retired clown and artist. He writes fiction and poetry to bring a little sun to the rainy darkness of the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared in Copperfield Review Quarterly, The Aurora Journal, The Remington Review and others.
Follow his work online at: http://www.davidmampelwriter.com, https://www.instagram.com/davidmampelwriter/ https://www.facebook.com/DavidMampelWriter
Categories
