One pool in particular lodged in my memory this morning and I realized it wasn't the pool, but whose pool it was. The pool was at Hollybrook in Pembroke Pines, Florida, a 55+ community where my grandparents moved in the 1970s. My grandmother's name was Marcia (more on her in another essay) and my grandfather's name was Hyman Weldon. As I swam back and forth this morning, I thought back to my youth when I visited grandparents during summer vacations. They adored me with such unabashed vigor that I can still feel the warmth of their embrace, one I sometimes miss more than I realize.
Hy was the youngest of 9 children born to William and Sarah Weldowsky (proper spelling never verified), Jewish emigrants from what is now the region that includes parts of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Russia. Born in Brooklyn in 1920, Hy was a teenager during The Great Depression. Though he was intelligent he dropped out of school, presumably to earn money to help support his family. He told me many tales, some even true, about his early jobs. He was a diaper truck delivery man and one time he and a friend tried to run away to join the circus. He married my grandmother at 21.
My mother was born just about a year later, followed by a son and another daughter. Along with some of his brothers, Hy found work as a house painter (though three of them were in fact color blind). Long before I was born, he became and remained a talented wallpaper hanger. In those days, you just said you were a "paper hanger." Eventually, he moved his family from Brooklyn to Levittown, NY, famous as the first real suburb. From Wikipedia: "Levittown gets its name from its builder, the firm of Levitt & Sons, Inc. founded by William Levitt, which built the district as a planned community between 1947 and 1951. William Levitt is considered the father of modern suburbia. Levittown was the first truly mass-produced suburb and is widely regarded as the archetype for postwar suburbs throughout the country."
For many years he commuted into New York City, hanging paper and working hard to support his family. (He never forgave Barbara Streisand for stiffing him on a job because she wasn't happy with the pattern of the paper she'd chosen!). In the years that followed, several of his brothers moved to South Florida. Not long after his youngest child became a young adult, he and my grandmother made their way to Florida, too. Though he lived in a retirement community, most weeks grandpa was still hanging paper. Retirement was never a financial possibility. He was working for himself, toting his equipment to jobs in a giant Cadillac. He'd bring ladders, buckets of paste, brushes, smoothing rollers, putty knives of every imaginable width, and his most important tool, a unsheathed razor blade. He had boxes and boxes of razor blades. My grandfather loved gadgets and 'invented' a few of his own. The razor blade is the indispensable tool of a paper hanger. Trimming paper, aligning seams, perfecting the corners where paper meets ceilings, all require a deft touch, years of experience, and a very sharp razor blade. To keep his blade always at the ready, he clipped it to the underside of his wristwatch - a beat up digital Casio - with a magnetic clip. The exposed blade stuck to the magnet and rested, always sharp, not far from the veins in his wrist. I can't recall his every cutting himself.
Hy Weldon loved to tinker with just about any kind of mechanical contraption. And though he probably wasn't a master at anything other than paperhanging, he was more than proficient in a multitude of mechanical and musical hobbies. Next to his study, between the organ and his desk was a closet, the shelves of which were lined with the detritus of a lifetime of gadgetry. There were radios of varied sizes, eras, and working order. There were several film cameras, flashes, light meters, lenses, and the photo developing equipment leftover from his darkroom days. There were video cameras, reel to reel projectors, slide projectors, and stacks and stacks of slide boxes. He had an old accordion, which had belonged to his son and which grandpa could still riff Scott Joplin's The Entertainer on. He was an able tailor and had an old sewing machine in the closet that he took out from time to time to mend clothes.
When I was about 14 I went down to visit my grandparents. Now that I was older, traveling on my own - my sisters now off to college and summer jobs - the usual agenda of trips to Disney World and water slide parks was to be replaced with a paper hanging apprenticeship. We woke up early in the morning and I joined grandpa in their small eat-in kitchen. Grandma made me a bialy with cream cheese and poured me a glass of orange juice. My grandfather enjoyed his breakfast with coffee, a Camel cigarette, and the Miami Herald. We grabbed some more tools from the front closet and stuffed them in the trunk already bulging with gear. Our job that week was at a furniture store. They were remodeling their showroom and putting up new walls which were to be papered. There were two hispanic plasterers there, too, who I clearly remember as having great affection for my grandpa. I vividly remember and can still feel how proud he was to introduce me, his only grandson, to them.
I was an able enough assistant under grandpa's expert tutelage. I learned how to properly mix the paste to just the right consistency. I learned how to handle the pasted paper so as not to dirty the exposed surfaces. I watched my grandfather expertly align the patterns so that the seams were all but invisible. I watched and tried to emulate how he'd brush the paper into its final place, starting from the top and moving trapped air down and out the sides of the sticky paper. He showed me how to use the wide rollers to push the last remaining air pockets out leaving only the perfectly smooth and now patterned surface devoid of seams, wrinkles, and bubbles.
In the many years that followed that summer, the work became increasingly physically taxing for grandpa. The decades of smoking caught up with him; heart problems arose. My grandparents didn't have the money to retire to a life of leisure. As my grandfather's health declined further they elected to move north to Connecticut to be close to their daughters. Though I no longer lived in the area, I visited my grandparents there regularly. The Florida condo decor always looked out of place in Connecticut, the white vinyl bench, the white porcelain cat, the glass paper weights, and the candy dishes frozen in 1970s Florida.
Just months after his first great-grandchild was born my grandfather died in December of 1994. Along with my family, I was able to be in the hospital as his vital signs faded. He was on some strong medication and wasn't in pain, but he was gaunt, pale, and as skinny as I'd ever seen him. He couldn't speak and wasn't really fully conscious. Our family commandeered a waiting room to sit vigil for the night, taking turns sitting by his bedside. As it became clear that his time was short, I went into the room. I sat on his right side and took his hand in mine. I don't remember the soft words I spoke, but as I said them I felt his hand squeeze mine, very tightly. As I remember it, he opened his eyes, saw me, and smiled broadly, something he hadn't done for anyone else in several days. And though it was not the smile of younger, stronger days it was the same one I'd seen so many times before. It was the same one he'd showered me with when taking me out to hang paper.
