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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us April 26, 2005 Tales From The Crib Pounding the pavement for grandpa When Hesperus was a few weeks old it was hard for her to settle down to sleep. We would rent old black and white movies and take turns walking back and forth with her, trying to help her relinquish her hold on the day. She never wanted to nurse to sleep. Instead, she would fuss and cry until, in what seemed like hours later, she would fall asleep in our arms. Then we would wait for just the right moment to stop walking and place her in her crib. Jennifer Margulis One day when I was tracing a pendulum pattern from the floor to the living room with Hesperus and James was entranced by Orson Wells’s Touch of Evil the phone rang. “Grandpa’s in the hospital,” my father-in-law shouted over Hesperus’s crying. “He had a heart attack playing golf. Is Jimmy there?” James hung up with his father and dialed the hospital. “We’ll come as soon as you’re out,” he promised. Hesperus cried a plaintive tired colicky cry. The muscles in my arms ached from holding her. My head hurt. “Is that the baby?” Grandpa Propis asked. “What a wonderful sound.” Grandpa Propis, born Giovanni di Properzio, came from a hard working, hard drinking, emotional Italian family. The cold winters of Buffalo and the mountains of Upstate New York appealed to many families from Torre de’ Passeri, the tiny town in Abruzzo from which his family immigrated. John Propis — the family changed their name when, during the Great Depression, their trucking business became so successful that they wanted to sell ice to customers outside of the Italian neighborhood — was as entrepreneurial and healthy as he was Catholic. He boasted that he put himself through college on his prizefighter winnings. After he graduated, he left a wife and two small children at his parents’ house and served as a fighter pilot in World War II. During the physical for the Navy, John learned that his heart rate was unusually low — at 35 beats per minute his heart was functioning at the rate of top conditioned Olympic athlete’s or an adult elephant’s. He failed the physical, but not because of his heart. He had had one molar removed from the back of his mouth. So he became a Navy fighter pilot via the Cavalry, attending pilot training school by requesting a lateral promotion transfer to the Navy when he was up for a higher rank. The absent molar overlooked, John helped regain Guadalcanal Island from the Japanese. Although he had five more children and began his own business, my husband’s grandfather retired from the insurance business in his early 50s and spent his days in a rocking chair smoking a pipe and reading the paper. He felt tired and ill. He shuffled rather than walked, spoke in his gruff way more slowly than usual, and looked old. Then he had a heart attack. The family panicked, sure that they were bidding him goodbye forever when he was wheeled into the operating room. After the surgery when my husband, then called Jimmy, tiptoed into the recovery room, he was disappointed to see Grandpa John sitting up. But Grandpa John was exuberant. “Want to see my scar?” he bellowed. “Listen, here’s what they did to me. First, they saw through your clavicle from your collarbone all the way down to your sternum. Then they put this thing in that cranks open your rib cage and breaks all your ribs. Then they take your heart out of its place and put it on ice to stop it and they circulate your blood artificially to keep you from expiring — even though they have already basically killed you. Then, this is the good part, ready? They take veins from your thighs that are the right size and splice them into your coronary arteries to make a free-flowing path for the blood to pass. I had a quadruple! Whaddya think of that?” John thought a lot of it. He put away his pipe and paper, relegated the rocking chair to an unfrequented corner of the study, and got out his running shoes. Every morning he hit the pavement hard. The neighbors, many of them also retired, would still be in their slippers, coming outside to pick up their morning papers. They learned that they could set their watches by his 7 o’clock run. He lost his paunch, grew taller overnight, and started to look much younger than his 60 years. Whether the day’s forecast called for snow — usual during Buffalo’s brutal winters — rain, hail, sleet, frozen rain, or bright sunshine, John Propis went for his morning run. “They look at me out there in the bad weather and think I’m crazy,” he said. “But, you know what I tell them? I say, ‘Whaddya looking at? I’m running as fast as I can. You know why? Because I’m running from the Grim Reaper!’” He dodged the Grim Reaper for 20 more years but died before he could meet his first great-grandchild. The weekend after Grandpa John’s funeral, we bought our baby daughter her first pair of shoes. Jennifer Margulis is a writer, consultant and photojournalist who lives in Ashland. 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