Cruise

Hello everyone; if you are still with me after nearly two weeks without a post, I am deeply grateful for your patience and I promise that it shall be rewarded. It has been a long and difficult time since last I sat writing, but I am glad to once again be telling my tale.

I got back from Paris the weekend before last (This trip, and my new found hate for LOT Polish Airlines, will be the subject of the next post) to find that I had several e-mails from my Dad, each subsequent message more urgent sounding than the last, until the last two e-mails, telling me that I should call home immediately. Not exactly the kind of thing that you want to come back to after a trip out of the country. I called home and did not receive an answer, so I went to bed and called home the next morning. My Dad answered and passed on the news.

My Granddad, Aaron Victor Cruise, one of the greatest and most resounding influences on my life, died on June 29, 2009, on a bright and wonderful Monday afternoon.

I finished my groats and called Jonathan to tell him that I would be taking the day off. I then sat around and debated what to do. There are rituals that I usually perform for the dead in my life, carried out in solitude and silence, as a way of putting my own emotional turmoil to rest. They are especially important when I cannot be present for funerals or dedications; I did one for my Aunt Ella, who died a few weeks ago, when I knew that I could not return for her funeral. But this time I did not feel like doing anything. I took a shower and wept for the first time, then headed out to the Morasco campus to sit in their beautiful gardens, taking along a couple of bags of frozen plums and the little journal that I had received at the beginning of my freshman year. It is a hard thing for me to journal; I find it incredibly abrasive to my personality to write as if I were speaking to a friend. Esoteric stories are much simpler to transfer to paper. But that day, I sat and wrote, remembering a few of the things that my Granddad had brought into my life. In the end, I was not able to write much; I was distracted by the beautiful day, but it was just as well since, when I got back that night I was able to put much more on paper. On the way back from Morasco, I picked up a bag of onions, a jar of apple cider vinegar, wheat cracker bread, some grapefruit, and a bottle of the darkest, most bitter wine that I could find.

One of the things that Granddad most loved to do was come in after a long day outside, sit at the table with a bowl of onions and vinegar to put on crackers, and watch a couple of episodes of Frasier. Some of my most vivid memories of him stem from laughing at the disproportionally highbrow antics of Kelsey Grammar and David Hyde Pierce. That night, I ate enough onions to make me sick, and I laughed so hard, and so desperately, that it hurt to move. As for the wine, there is something I once read about the death of one of the oldest African gods. When his two sons, estranged for years, met again the eve after his death, they sat, drinking an old, bitter vintage made from the tears of virgins, wine made for the gods, and told stories. While my draught was not the product of virgin tears, nor did I drink as deeply as the brothers, it was a mighty thing to be able, for the first time in my life, to do, and as I had no family with whom to tell stories, I wrote.

And I wrote.

And I ate.

And I wept.


I travelled home on Thursday, arriving back in Raleigh on Friday, coming home to a house filled with all of my family, from all over the world; myself from Poland, my cousin from Korea, and my Aunt from Scotland. At the table the following morning, we had a truly international conversation, exchanging Won bills and Zloty. It was incredible to see someone representing every branch of the Cruise tree all under the same roof. I hadn't seen my cousin West for 9 years; the last memories he had of me were from back when I toted around my 20 pounds of Pokémon cards wherever I went. Needless to say, it had been far too long, and though the circumstances had an underlying tone of the morbid, the atmosphere was much akin to the end of a Wes Anderson movie. It was three days of "Ooh La Lah", "Everyone", "Queen Bitch", and "Les Champs Elysses".

Music was a big thing over the weekend. I finally pulled off "Into the West" from the end of Return of the King and I could not get it out of my head (actually, it's still stuck in there), but it was so appropriate that I only encouraged its entrenchment by listening to it over and over again. Tim Stewart from the NC Symphony played a couple of pieces to accompany my brother, my sister and I, and he played the best taps that I've ever heard. No fitter ceremony for a magnificently lived life could have been given.

While I was in the States, it felt like everything was moving very slowly, that I would have plenty of time with my family and friends, an ample chance to grieve my loss and to recover; now that I am back in Poznan, it feels like everything moved to fast to be real, and that none of it really happened. The feelings are very confusing and difficult to master. I am incredibly sad about the great man that I have lost, but memories are still fresh enough and I have not truly come to grips with my Granddad's absence, so it seems as if I could return in a few weeks and see him out in the yard, doing what he always did. At the same time, I have said goodbye and I know that what I have left of him is the sizable portion of my own character which draws its strength from his being.

What this disparity leaves is a calm sadness and the overcoming desire to live gloriously. Glimpses of the past, mostly images of sitting at the table with my Granddad, or hugging him when he arrived and left my house three times a year, rise to the surface of my consciousness whenever concentration drifts, and these parsings make my heart heavy. But knowing that I got everything I could possibly get out of our relationship, and that he was following every step of this journey I am currently on, it pushes me past sadness and into a jump up and get busy mode. Before his death, life in Poznan had been stagnating, but I am now seeing beyond what kept me locked in earlier.

I have not yet let on my plans for after the next couple of weeks yet, I think. The research project was only supposed to last for 10 weeks and then we would all go home, but I have elected to stay on in Europe and do a bit of travelling on my own. After leaving Poznan, I will fly with the others for Frankfurt am Main, Germany and then take a train to Frankfurt Hesse where I will spend a day, doing what I don't know (maybe checking out the Deus Ex II location in Trier). Then I will fly to Zadar, Croatia and make my way down the coast to the town of Opuzen, where a recent acquaintance will be getting me in touch with a shepherd. I will spend the next three weeks shepping sheep, swimming in the warm, blue ocean, camping on the beach, and whittling my crook. Then I have to get back to Zadar, where I will fly to Edinburgh, Scotland.

Here is where I complete my encircling of the family tree. My Granddad came from a line of Scots, the Foster Clan, and I value this heritage just as much as that which stems from Polish soil. It pains me that, only now after he can no longer read my adventures, do I come around to mentioning this part of my trip and the importance that my Granddad's roots have to me. But in a way, I feel like he was always aware of this; it didn't necessarily need to be said.

It has taken much courage to get through some of the ordeals I have faced on this splendid sojourn into parts of the world previously unknown, courage that I can trace directly to experiences and lessons shared through my Granddad. Without his presence in my life, I would have turned out a much different person, and I don't know how much of this I would have been able to do. It is thus that I dedicate this trip and everything I have done and will do this summer to his memory. At his funeral, I spoke of the living's remembrances and how my Granddad's life was so powerful and affected so much that it could never be forgotten. And I spoke of the continuation of adventures, both those of the surviving and those that now await Granddad, in a far green country with a swift sunrise. There will be a day when I can have that country too, but until then I shall seek Fiddler's Green on Earth and I shall not forget, because I simply cannot, my Granddad. He is a part of me, and though the source is gone, its creation lingers and flourishes, rewriting its origins again and again in the minds of others.

I found it incredibly fitting that the 23rd psalm was explained during the funeral. This is a psalm for shepherds, and the reader gave advice on the actual art of shepherding during the service. It was as if I was simply receiving another lesson from a man hell bent on seeing his grandson succeed. There is none more fortunate in familial ties than I.

If you would like to read my speech, the link to the google doc is here: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcwm2bz6_0d5wtxnhm