Last night my mom called and told me that my grandfather, Spike Daniel, had passed away in his sleep. His health had been failing over the last few weeks, and last week I was lucky enough to get in one last phone call with him.
The last time I saw him was during my last visit to America with Kuniko. We had told everyone that we were going to get married, and I wanted to bring her by to meet my grandparents. Spike welcomed her into the family, and asked her all kinds of questions. After we left he said how much he liked her, and how much he supported me going off to live in a distant country.
Growing up I lived in Northern California with my folks and my grandparents all lived in Southern California, in San Diego. We visited when we could, but because of the distance I didn’t really get to know my grandparents that well until I moved down to San Diego in 2001. I lived in an apartment not too far away, and I would go and visit almost every week. My grandma would fill my stomach with food and we would sit around their table and talk about everything. I remember at first being a little uncomfortable because I didn’t know what to talk about, but they always made me feel welcome.
Later my friend Brian Haven moved in with me, and soon we were both going over to visit. Spike dubbed us the “Dudes of Leisure”, since we both only worked part time and spent every minutes of our spare time hiking all over the area.
One of the entertaining things about hanging out with Spike was that he was from a different era, and he would suddenly come up with these strange English expressions that somehow survived lingual extinction by residing in some corner of his brain. We dubbed them “Spike-isms”, and we recorded quite a few. He would say something funny, and we’d go scrambling for a pencil to write it down. You really felt like you were channeling into his past – fifty, sixty, seventy years ago people were saying these things! Some made sense, and the ones that didn’t were somehow even funnier.
Eventually Brian Haven moved to Pittsburgh to go to grad school at Carnegie Mellon, and I got into the JET Program and prepared to move to Japan. It was tough to say goodbye to my grandparents – they had become accustomed to my visits, and they didn’t have a lot of friends to take care of them.
Although we lived far apart, in a very real way I felt like he was here with me. He was a daily reader of this journal, often sending me e-mails to correct errors in my spelling or grammar. If I fell behind a couple of days in my entries, he’d send me a message to make sure things were going OK. He loved hearing about my students here and how they reacted to a big American guy as their teacher.
Spike lived a long time. He was always laughing about something, and he had a good philosophy on how life treats you, and how you should treat life. I’m glad that I had a chance to really get to know him during my time in San Diego. I will miss him.
