pakka

My paternal grandfather was known to all and sundry as "Pakka", because I, the first grandchild, couldn't pronounce "Grandpa" and dubbed him that instead. He grew up in Seattle, and joined the Air Force after Pearl Harbor. He wanted to be a pilot, but on account of his bad eyesight--which I alone of his grandchildren inherited--they assigned him to meteorology instead. So he spent the next few years tracking the weather in the China-Burma-India theater: he was stationed mostly in China but he also visited Bombay and Burma, and after I did the same two years ago, I showed him photographs and we traded stories. He walked down the streets of Karachi while it was still India, a scant few years (I think) before dear S's forebears arrived there. As a child I ran my fascinated fingers over the tiny embroidered slippers that sat on a shelf in his study; now I'm wearing a silver-and-carnelian bracelet he brought back from China in 1945, and gave to me the year I went to Oxford.

When he came home from the war he studied engineering at the University of Washington on the G.I. Bill. He met an eighteen-year-old undergraduate with curly dark hair and married her before her nineteenth birthday, and they lived in the attic room of a boarding house on 17th Avenue in the University District. Half a century later, when I was a sixteen-year-old student at the same university, I left home and found a room to rent for $275 a month, all I could afford on my work-study earnings. Later we realized it was the very same one that he and my grandmother had occupied as newlyweds; I slept for a summer under the rafters of the room where my eldest uncle was conceived. Pakka worked almost all his adult life for Boeing, helping design the planes he'd wanted to fly. They retired before I was born and built a house on an old holly farm on an island in Puget Sound. I spent much of my childhood there. My parents had a troublesome habit of getting broke and/or getting evicted, so we moved in with my grandparents at least four separate times, and even when we weren't living with them, we were always moving around (eight or nine different houses/apartments in my first fourteen years) so the farm felt more like home than any other place. He taught me to pick cherries from the orchard with a cherry-picker he'd made from a coffee-can on a long stick, and scolded me for chasing the chickens. They sold it when I was eighteen, during the year I first lived abroad, and I never quite got over coming back from Edinburgh to find it gone: the holly branches taller than the house, the pond where my sisters and I swam, the espaliered apple trees he so carefully grafted to separate my grandmother's garden from my uncle's vegetable patch.

He was already becoming ill then, with the disease that slowly took him away. Since that time I've been away more often than not, and each time I came back he looked older and more frail. When I returned from Turkey last fall, though, he seemed to have turned the corner, so before coming to New York in February I said my quiet goodbyes just in case. I am not sure whether he was fully aware of who I was the last afternoon I visited. My grandmother--his wife of five and a half decades--had emergency heart surgery a month ago. Her recovery has been slow and hard, but she was determined to get out of the hospital and back to the island in time to see him again. She was finally well enough to visit him yesterday. He died this morning, at the age of eighty-two. He is survived by his wife, four children, and six grandchildren, the youngest of whom was born in the Hunan province, in a city he may or may not have passed through or flown above once upon a time. He has been sick and in pain for a long time, and I'm glad he's at peace.

H.M.A. 1923-2006