Vonnegut

As all of you who read this know, Kurt Vonnegut died two days ago. I've commented on other blogs but I have yet to say something about it here, primarily because I don't really know what to say. In class, Michael commented on the fact that Vonnegut was the reason for his life-long interest in fiction. I'm slightly different in the fact that, while I joke about it, Vonnegut really was like a grandfather to me. I don't remember my own grandparents. They all died before I was 5. My only memory of any of them is my grandfather on my mother's side. I have two memories, actually. Memory 1: I'm laying on his lap as a very young child (guessing 2 or 3, as unrealistic as that is). He's wearing a cowboy hat and telling me war stories because he was in World War II. He told me that he shot Hitler in the ass. In reality, he was a personal guard for several generals throughout the war because he was too old to have enlisted in the first place, but the US Army is not stupid enough to turn away willing recruits. Before that, he drove amphibious ducks. I think he drove one to Normandy, but the entire was subject of D-Day was taboo and still is. That fact alone makes me positive that he did. This memory is suspect for several reasons. Reason one is that we are not supposed to be able to remember things before age 8. Reason two is that I have a photograph of my little self on my grandpa's lap while he is wearing a cowboy hat. Either my mother of myself probably made up the rest, but I don't care because the only other memory I have of him is my neighbor picking me up from school on April 10th, 1987. My neighbor only picked me up one time in my life. When I got home, my mom was in the kitchen with the lights off crying. She told me that I wasn't going to see grandpa anymore, and even though I was exactly two weeks shy of 5 years old, I knew that he was dead, and I knew what dead meant.

What all of this has to do with Vonnegut is that I never had the aged perception of the world in my regular life. To this day I don't feel sympathy for people who lose their grandparents because I never had the chance to make the attachment to my own. My own parents are in their sixties, making them as old as some of my friends' grandparents (screw proper pluralization, I'm drunk). Because of this fact, I felt a familial bond with Vonnegut from the moment I first read Cat's Cradle during my senior year of high school. Being a hardcore cynic myself, I instantly embraced the cold point of view that he often provided throughout his work. At the same time, I took it for what I think he meant it as: reality. The world is cruel in that it always ends in death no matter how enjoyable it may be. Often times, the world is not enjoyable. Between these times, we are graced with moments of genuine beauty. Our lives become a summary of those moments of beauty as we approach our own death. We start to read the obituary page as an excuse to tell our friends about the wonderful times we had with those that we loved who are now gone. We wonder about our own death, not because we fear it like we did when we were young, but because we are afraid that people won't see us in the obituary page and call up Earl to recount the time that the three of us got caught trying to paint profanity on the water tower in high school. Kurt Vonnegut was my grandpa. My grandpa died two days ago. So it goes.