Johnny, that's no way to write a blog entry

No longer a K*mart, the building behind which a crew of like-minded outcasts and I spent the marjority of our pre-teen and early-teenage years is now a Target. Nearby, there's now a Wal*mart. Gone is the Shop Rite where I bagged groceries, cleaned the tops of refrigerators, shoveled congealing garbage from the loading docks, and put away the produce as a teenager. Delran has supersized its strip malls.

And that's okay, as long as, down the highway, the trucker motels still advertise mirrored ceilings and waterbeds. Although, as my younger sister pointed out, they are less the destination for adolescent deflowerings and more locations to house wards of the state.

Because Renee asked: In the early-1980s, when my grandfather moved in with my family, my parents decided to convert half of our garage into a little room where my Poppop lived (I'm tired of writing "my grandfather" -- I'll call him by which I knew him, although I think it smacks of Northeast Philly shanty Irish). My parents realized that Poppop, in his early-80s, was done with apartment living when some peculiar behavior (his percolating coffee maker melted onto the electric burner, some car crashes) indicated that it might be a good idea for alternate arrangements.

I was ten when Poppop moved in, and he consistently called me "Johnny," which is the name of his son, my uncle. It was the kind of thing I really didn't know how to begin to correct. I think there were a few attempts to remind him that I was going by Charles (my mother: "No, Dad, that's your Grandson, Charles!"), and he occasionally remembered ("J--, J--, Charles . . .") but, in the end, Johnny it was. He was, after all, a man in his eighties.

So, like this: "Oh, hey! Good morning, Johnny!" "Johnny, did you take out the garbage?" "Johnny, I'll be at Grandparents Day tomorrow at your school." "Johnny, turn down the radio." "Johnny, have you seen my teeth?"

Get it?

I'm not sure about everyone else's grandfather, but mine was an aging, drinking man who smoked a lot of cigars. I felt a sense of awe around him, but never that cuddly grandfather feeling that gets described in Hallmark cards, although I loved him, dearly. Poppop was also a die-hard Irish Catholic. Both my parents were working, and when my sisters and I would get home from Saint Charles Borromeo grade school, we'd find Poppop smoking a cigar, praying the rosary, gazing out our front window: "Oh, hello, Johnny. How was school?" He dressed in a button up shirt, bow tie, slacks, and a jacket every day of his life, even when it was a sweltering summer Sunday. Going to mass was very imporant for him. (I'm sure he must have been proud of my stint as an altar boy.)

There were these Sundays when he'd get up at 5am for mass at 11:15am, and prepare for services. At 6am he'd start to call out for my mother, asking if it wasn't true that we'd be late for church, and how much longer we'd be. (Perhaps this explains my mother's own reaction formation, perpetual late-comer she has always been.) Coming into the kitchen, where we'd find a fully clothed cane-tapping man with an annoyed look on his face, we'd ask Poppop if he had at least had any breakfast? some cereal? toast? orange juice -- anything? His reply was always the same: "I'll be fine. I had a nice glass of tepid water about an hour ago."

The Glass of Tepid Water remark was great for a number of reasons: it signified an everyday belief in the practice of Catholic martyrdom on a local level (no, really, I'll be just fine, here, suffering) and it resonates along the generations of my grandfather's children (in terms of what is now called passive-aggressive behavior) and a postmodern twist in its final incarnation of what my siblings and I understand as communication along the lines of sly, hyper-aware meta-commentary that restores folkloric value to what might be seen as quotidian teasing.

Or so I'd like to believe.