The first image below is an image my brother took a few months ago of the field behind my grandfather’s old body shop. This image is one of all that remains of the field behind his shop that used to be essentially a junkyard. As a child, I remember this field being full of row after row of cars with well worn paths that I and my brother explored chasing rabbits and doing the things that young boys do in such landscapes. The field looks small and mostly barren now. What seemed so large and exciting to me as a child now is a small patch of land overgrown with grass and the shells of two cars.
I actually met the owner of these two cars the other day when he came to visit my grandfather in the hospital. He remarked that he needed to get someone over there to get his cars. Part of me agreed that he needed to get over there and remove his stuff while another part of me saw it as removing some of the last vestiges of how I remember my grandfather’s garage and junkyard. The garage is now a recycling center. While the outer shell looks largely the same, everything else seems dramatically different. Over the last year or so my father and his family have been slowly closing up shop on the garage and junkyard with which my grandfather identified and was identified by for so many years.
It has been a difficult process for all involved. My grandfather went to the garage everyday for much of his life and for all of my life. Almost anytime you would go to visit him, you would find him in the garage working on something in the garage. While I did not inherit the mechanical aptitude my grandfather passed onto my father, I always enjoyed visiting his garage and watching tools, machines, and my grandfather at work.
Some of the random things I remember about my grandfather and my visits with him: getting glass bottles of pop out of an old fashioned pop machine; the smell of paint fumes from the paint bay; climbing and playing on the frame rack; the pop and hum of the air compressor; getting to use and play with tools that I probably had no business touching; sitting on his front porch underneath a big tree; trying to run up the side of the big tree because he told us our uncles used to be able to run up it; the fact that he never locked his house, the fact that he had no lock on his bathroom door; learning how to break green beans on his front porch, learning from him and being amazed that potatoes grow underground; playing in his cellar, spending Christmas evening at his house, in later years visiting with him and getting to update my grandfather on what was new in my life, and watching my own children get to see and do some of the same things I saw and did as a child.
During the course of writing about these memories my grandfather, Paul Drury, passed away. I saw him the day before he died in a hospice center. He was very restless and agitated. As I held his hands, he briefly opened his eyes, raised up his frail body and said “Hey” twice. I don’t think there was any real sense of recognition of me or what he was doing or saying but the word “Hey” was very clear and the last thing I ever heard my grandfather say.
The last time I visited my grandfather when he was still lucid was at a nursing home in Louisville. Even though he was ill and becoming increasingly confused, he made sure to introduce me to all of the nursing staff. I spent a couple of hours with him that day visiting and trying to get him to eat lunch. I also remember that he told the nursing staff that their coffee tasted like “shit”; that may be part of the reason I was largely unsuccessful in getting him to eat lunch. Little did I know that would be my last time with him where we were able to really interact but those are two memories that I will remember for a very long time.
The other image attached to this article is of the roll backs and wreckers that led my grandfather’s processional to the graveyard earlier today. My grandfather ran a wrecker service for many years and his peers saw fit to honor him with a parade of wreckers. It was a very moving and touching sight to behold and a fitting tribute to the man I called Drury.
Originally written by Jeff Drury September 2010
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