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thehefnerBecause YOU (or at least Molly) demanded it, here it is. The rough first draft of the Hefner Monologue- "My Grandfather's Last Words." In later editions, I plan/hope to add more about my grandfather's life, as well as the importance and influence he has had in the world of baseball (big, BIG thanks to Jay for his research here, which I definitely plan to incorporate, if not here, then in a whole seperate article on my grandfather). Again, this is rough, but I figured what the hell, here it is. Let me know what you think.
I never realized how rich and complex my grandfather was until after he died. Around the time of the funeral, old friends were coming in from all around the world. They recounted to us his past exploits and revealing to us for the first time all the other faces he had worn in his lifetime; a soldier, a parodist, an explorer, a Christian, a humanitarian, a baseball legend, and a husband.
See, I never knew any of this. Well, that’s not entirely true, I admit. Sure, I’d gotten inklings here and there- the boxes upon boxes of baseball books and documents, the statue of an angry cartoon insect with a sailor hat and bayonet with the inscription, “SeaBees,” all the trophies and plaques and books all with the same mysterious anagram, S.A.B.R. like some clandestine secret society. But when you’re growing up, even into your high school days, you never really give these things much thought. Or at least, I never did.
Certainly, he had tried very hard over the years to get me interested in baseball, but while my brother Edd shared Grandpa’s enthusiasm, I never caught on. Grandpa always kept a few mitts and balls in the truck of his car, always ready to bust them out for a game of catch at a moment’s notice. Every picnic, every visit to a park, every time we visited that utterly worthless space of barren property in Pennsylvania that my grandfather bought after being convinced it would be a worthy investment, there he was, ball in mitt in hand. And there I was, huddled under a tree or sitting in the car, bored and terrified of getting sunburned. That, and the ball. I hated the goddamn ball.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that baseballs, like footballs or basketballs or dodgeballs or hell every single kind of ball I’d discover in life, had one singular purpose in mind. And that was to hurt me. Oh sure, most people think they’re just to be used in sports, for fun and character-building competition and the like. That’s just what the balls want you to think.
Day and night, the balls were plotting against me, ready to strike at any time and leave really nasty welts on my supple, pale person. They were probably in cahoots with my bicycle, my fear of which I still have yet to overcome. Thus my grandfather eventually gave up trying to get me to play catch with him. Of course in retrospect I sometimes wish I did. After all, he was a man so loving and gentle that he could have tamed even a vicious, bloodthirsty baseball.
At the funeral, my stepfather Gordon described by grandfather as a “true Christian.” He said that Robert Davids actually lived by his faith rather than just talked about it. In fact, now that I think about it, he never talked about it at all. That was the thing about Bob Davids, his remarkable humility that crossed over into everything he did. He didn’t preach to anyone. He never had to. His life was testament enough.
I don’t even recall him talking to me about anything in the Bible. In fact, once I read cartoonist Kyle Baker’s graphic novel about King David, I asked my grandfather about some biblical reference of some sort. Perhaps if the Alzheimer’s hadn’t progressed that far, he might have had an answer for me. Instead, he referred me to his wife, my grandmother Yvonne, a Catholic woman whose biblical knowledge is rooted almost entirely in Cecil B. Demille and other old Hollywood bible epics. I think Grandpa would have had the answer, but then again, considering he was Lutheran and that the question didn’t have anything to do with baseball statistics, maybe not.
When he died, I was in the middle of rehearsals for the Rude Mechanicals’ production of The Tempest, I told my friend Jay about how I was going to the funeral for Bob Davids. His jaw dropped, and he said, “The Bob Davids?! SABR Bob Davids?!” He then explained, in a calmness that only barely held back his percolating geek excitement, “There are three truly important things in baseball history. First was Babe Ruth. He changed how the game was played. The second was the uniting of the leagues. And the third… the third was Bob Davids.”
I may not have inherited my grandfather’s love of the game, but if there’s one trait we share, it’s our encyclopedic knowledge of trivia. Really useless information that excited and fascinates the hell out of us. And my grandfather’s love was for baseball history and statistics. His passion was so great that he sought out other enthusiasts and statisticians, founding the Society for American Baseball Research. He also formulated a whole system of calculating stats, a system that is still being used today by the major leagues to accurately predict how a minor league player will perform for the rest of his entire career. The man who could barely balance his checkbook was the same man revered as a god by the world of baseball for creating Sabermetrics.
When my mother, Edd, and I visited the Baseball Hall of Fame, we told the curator our relation to Bob Davids and we were subsequently treated like members of the royal family. We were given a personal tour of the museum, including the private rooms not open to the general public. We were taken to what was to have been christened “The Bob Davids Meeting Room” but my grandfather graciously declined their offer to have it be named after him.
Afterwards, we were taken down to the special climate-controlled archives downstairs to see the file they had on him. It was slim, just a profile and a few photographs, but the fact that they had one at all still greatly impresses us today. After his death, there was some talk of getting him inaugurated into the Hall, which would have made him the first “civilian” ever inducted, but we haven’t heard anything lately.
But even then, I was only barely aware of my grandfather’s rich past and current importance. I never knew that he explored Greenland, of all bloody places. I never knew his penchant to rewrite the lyrics of popular songs for comedy purposes, long before Weird Al came about (but around the Spike Jones era, for you fogies of the older persuasion). I never suspected the supposedly-legendary dry wit concealed behind those unassuming Iowa farmboy’s eyes. Even those very few times I went with him to Shepard’s Table to help feed the homeless, when some of those other volunteers went up to give their testimonials of his dedication to charity, even this was not the man I knew. This wasn’t my Bob Davids. Not this crusader, this comedian, this adventurer! To me, Bob Davids was one person and one person only. He was my Grandpa. Simple- and I emphasize “simple”- at that.
That’s not meant to be disparaging in the least, understand. It’s just how the man was to me all those years. Grandpa was a quiet old man with a soft voice, a gentle laugh, and a sneeze that could topple mountains and make Thor himself exclaim, “Dude, that’s loud!” Oh, and he snored, too. Good lord, yes. Loud, continuous snores, after which he would then stop for a few seconds, only to erupt in a huge snort so loud it would wake himself up.
This was the man who would take me on his knee and sing “You Are My Sunshine” to me. He’d reach up to the lamp next to the chair and hold onto the switch, so when he’d sing, “You make me happy, when skies are…” there was a klik-klik and the lights would go out, “… gray. You’ll never know dear, how much I love you, so please, don’t take my…” klik-klik “… sunlight away.”
This was the man I knew, the man who taught me to say “please” and “thank you,” wherever I go. The man who never liked to hear people swear or to take God’s name in vain, but never lectured them on it when they did either. It wasn’t his way to confront anyone like that. If he was offended, he would just stay strong, say nothing, and turn the other cheek. Gordon was right, he was a True Christian, and God knows there isn’t enough of his kind in the world. He was the man who loved us, even if he never said it. He loved us and he loved his wife.
He and Yvonne were married in 1952. He loved her thoroughly and never asked anything of her, save one thing. One single thing. He wanted a normal-sized wife. Slender would have been nice, but really, all he wanted was a woman of normal, average weight. She knew this.
Then my mother was born, and afterwards Yvonne proceeded to have miscarriage after miscarriage, each pregnancy lasting shorter than the last. After she lost the seventh child, she understandably fell into a deep depression. She gave up trying, and being a good Catholic girl, never slept with her husband again.
As much as she loved Bob, she also came to resent him. And one of the main sources of contention was the Davids family itself. Grandpa came from a big Iowa family, the kind that almost needs to rent out a convention center to hold a reuinion. When a relative would come by the visit, Grandpa would always offer up his home and hospitality to them. That's what families, especially those kinds of families, do. But Yvonne never understood that. She always accused the relatives of sponging off her husband (and by proxy, herself) and of being no-good vicious gossipers when they just liked to talk about what the rest of the family was up to, y'know?
She grew increasingly resentful and bitter, and turned all the depression and anger of the miscarriages against him. She felt utterly powerless, and yet she still had one way to control him. One way to exert power over him. She ate. And ate. And ate and never stopped, indulging in every single impulse to consume.
When my brother was one year old, he failed to pronounce “grandma” and instead took to calling her “dama.” Instead of correcting him, the name stuck and everyone, including my mother, has since called her Dama. So as I grew up, I also started calling her Dama.
These days, we sometimes call her “Dama the Hutt” behind her back.
If you think that’s unduly cruel, allow me to recount one little event that happened about a year after Grandpa died. Dama was living with us, that is Mother and me, a situation that didn’t suit any of us particularly well. One night, on the eve of Edd’s birthday, my mother comes into my room, weeping. I’m talking about the kind of crying that can mean one thing and one thing only.
“Oh my God,” I said, “Who died?”
Mom waved her hand, sat on my bed, and between sobs managed to say, “I just… I can’t be alone right now, I can’t. I… I… I was making a cake… for your brother’s birthday… and I… put the cake on the table, and I was g-going to ice it…”
“Oh no,” I said, anticipating a disaster all too familiar in our household. “One of the dogs ate it. Did Rosie get on her hind legs and eat the cake?”
Mom shook her head, and began to sob again.
“No,” she said, with a sudden burst of furious indignation. “Your grandmother!”
Now let me explain. My grandmother didn’t actually eat the cake. That’s not what happened. The cake itself was perfectly fine, just bare and naked because Dama ate the frosting. Now, when I say that my grandmother ate the frosting, I don’t mean she actually scraped the frosting off the cake and ate it. Lordy no, that’d just be pathetic and wrong. No, my grandmother ate the frosting right out of the container.
Now understand, this isn’t the yummy rich kind of frosting you’d buy at the supermarket. See, that I’d understand, since how many of us used to dream of just digging into a can of that stuff back when we were kids, right? But no, this was Ma’s home-made decorative cake frosting. The kind of frosting you’re not really supposed to eat too much of, that you’d scrape off to the side of the plate. That kind of frosting. And do you know what’s in home-made decorative cake frosting?
Two things, and two things only. Powdered sugar and Crisco. And we’re talking the whoooole blue bucket here. Imagine mixing those two ingredients together in a Tupperware container. Now imagine that container in my grandmother’s left hand, and a spoon in the other. Before you ask, no, we’re still not quite sure why she’s still alive either.
At that point, she’d been living with us for scarcely three months and already we were breaking down. Grandpa lived with this for thirty years and never said a word. Not a single word of protest or complaint, not even as he cooked for her and cleaned up after her, did all her laundry and all her shopping, washed and put away all her dishes. She still had a driver’s license, but she hadn’t driven a car since Carter was president. She never needed to, because Mr. Dave was her personal, faithful chauffer. Bertie Wooster never had it so good.
She just sat, watched TV, and preened over her tiny yipping Bichon Frise Mi-Mi, so often with that baby voice of hers that it eventually became her permanent speaking tone. She got larger and larger, peaking at 350 pounds at one point, and my grandfather never said a word against her. It’s hard to imagine and yet appallingly clear in my memory; this man-god to a whole culture and yet a slave, however willing, inside his own home. The man was a saint, and not just in the figurative sense either, as events would soon have it.
This seemingly-unshakeable status quo was forever altered when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Dama went though various modes of denial, always holding out to some doctor’s supposition that the lapses in memory were tied to a lack of certain vitamins or some mild genetic family trait. But genetics were no defense, as almost all of Grandpa’s brothers had already been diagnosed with the same disease, so this didn’t come as much of a shock to either of them.
Grandpa kept quiet about it as he had everything else in his life save for baseball, and tried to keep going about his life as he always had. Keeping up with S.A.B.R. correspondence, maintaining the useless property in Pennsylvania, dutifully serving her wife, but of course it couldn’t last for long. Although the deterioration was very gradual, it was also very noticeable, as was his own frustration. I think the worst part of the disease is the fact that the sufferer feels the memories slipping away, knows that they’re missing something, so of course they get angry and bitter.
Dama never really understood, or maybe she didn’t want to understand. She kept pressing and harassing him when he’d forget, as if her asking, “But don’t you remember…?” would actually rekindle the lost memory, but it only made him more upset. Before very long, it became clear to us that we were starting to lose him, to really lose him, and that the worst days for us all were still ahead.
He still insisted on flying out to Wisconsin to attend what would be his final S.A.B.R. convention. At the end of the first day, he became convinced that it was time to fly back to D.C. and would not listen to the protests of his colleagues and friends who kept insisting that there were still two more days of the convention.
Eventually, he won out and boarded a plane, but it wasn’t a plane to D.C. To this day, we still don’t know exactly where he went in those 24 hours that we completely lost him, but he eventually came to his senses enough to fly back to Wisconsin in time for the final day of the convention. Once there, he held one of his famous yellow-card baseball quizzes for his fellow S.A.B.R. members, his memory for baseball stats as sharp as ever.
We’re all convinced that had the Alzheimer’s progressed all the way, those stats would have been the very last things to go. Long after all the long-term memories of his two grandchildren, his wife, his one child, and his own childhood. So it really was a blessing, not even a mixed one, that it never got to that point.
The stairs at my grandparents’ house used to always be carpeted, but we were preparing to move them out eventually so the house needed some serious revisions if we were to even try to get it sold, so the old worn carpeting came off so we could paint the steps. Edd did the job himself, and when it was over Grandpa insisted on putting a plastic tarp over the steps. He and Edd argued over it, and eventually Edd acquiesced to our grandfather. To this day, a part of Edd still blames himself for what happened next.
A couple days later, Grandpa slipped and fell down the stairs. Whether he had the stroke before, after, or simultaneous with the fall is still uncertain. He went to the hospital, where they opened him up and discovered that the cancer that he had for a long time, the cancer that had gone into remission a year ago and was all right, had come back in full force and had riddled his body. So they just closed him back up.
Dama signed the “do not resuscitate” papers, and that was that. It was just a matter of waiting now, and we knew it wouldn’t be long. We also knew that between the Alzheimer’s, the coma, and the drugs they had him hopped up on, chances were he was already as good as gone. We’d never see him again. Edd had gone back to Seattle to be with his girlfriend Phoebe. I was back at Washington College, the second semester of my freshman year. Mom had to go to work and manage her own home as best as she could. So it was Dama, as of course it had to have been Dama, who was there by his side until the end.
She was there all three days, by his side, to hear his last words when he finally came out of unconsciousness for the final time. He opened his eyes, looked around through the haze, and she held his hand.
She asked her husband, “Do you know who I am?”
And he looked at her. He looked at this woman who he has served for decades, served because he loved her as a husband and as a Christian. And Bob Davids, the boy who had grown from humble Iowa beginnings… the Christian saint who served his fellow man never looking for anything in return… the parodist with the razor wit whose jokes had become the stuff of legend… the hero to millions who forever changed how the great American pastime was studied… the man who loved his family as much as he loved his own God… and the quietly devoted, loving husband to Yvonne Davids after years, years of service and dedication… he looked up at her and said, with quiet warmth:
“Yes. You’re Flabbo.”
And he died.
I never realized how rich and complex my grandfather was until after he died. Around the time of the funeral, old friends were coming in from all around the world. They recounted to us his past exploits and revealing to us for the first time all the other faces he had worn in his lifetime; a soldier, a parodist, an explorer, a Christian, a humanitarian, a baseball legend, and a husband.
See, I never knew any of this. Well, that’s not entirely true, I admit. Sure, I’d gotten inklings here and there- the boxes upon boxes of baseball books and documents, the statue of an angry cartoon insect with a sailor hat and bayonet with the inscription, “SeaBees,” all the trophies and plaques and books all with the same mysterious anagram, S.A.B.R. like some clandestine secret society. But when you’re growing up, even into your high school days, you never really give these things much thought. Or at least, I never did.
Certainly, he had tried very hard over the years to get me interested in baseball, but while my brother Edd shared Grandpa’s enthusiasm, I never caught on. Grandpa always kept a few mitts and balls in the truck of his car, always ready to bust them out for a game of catch at a moment’s notice. Every picnic, every visit to a park, every time we visited that utterly worthless space of barren property in Pennsylvania that my grandfather bought after being convinced it would be a worthy investment, there he was, ball in mitt in hand. And there I was, huddled under a tree or sitting in the car, bored and terrified of getting sunburned. That, and the ball. I hated the goddamn ball.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that baseballs, like footballs or basketballs or dodgeballs or hell every single kind of ball I’d discover in life, had one singular purpose in mind. And that was to hurt me. Oh sure, most people think they’re just to be used in sports, for fun and character-building competition and the like. That’s just what the balls want you to think.
Day and night, the balls were plotting against me, ready to strike at any time and leave really nasty welts on my supple, pale person. They were probably in cahoots with my bicycle, my fear of which I still have yet to overcome. Thus my grandfather eventually gave up trying to get me to play catch with him. Of course in retrospect I sometimes wish I did. After all, he was a man so loving and gentle that he could have tamed even a vicious, bloodthirsty baseball.
At the funeral, my stepfather Gordon described by grandfather as a “true Christian.” He said that Robert Davids actually lived by his faith rather than just talked about it. In fact, now that I think about it, he never talked about it at all. That was the thing about Bob Davids, his remarkable humility that crossed over into everything he did. He didn’t preach to anyone. He never had to. His life was testament enough.
I don’t even recall him talking to me about anything in the Bible. In fact, once I read cartoonist Kyle Baker’s graphic novel about King David, I asked my grandfather about some biblical reference of some sort. Perhaps if the Alzheimer’s hadn’t progressed that far, he might have had an answer for me. Instead, he referred me to his wife, my grandmother Yvonne, a Catholic woman whose biblical knowledge is rooted almost entirely in Cecil B. Demille and other old Hollywood bible epics. I think Grandpa would have had the answer, but then again, considering he was Lutheran and that the question didn’t have anything to do with baseball statistics, maybe not.
When he died, I was in the middle of rehearsals for the Rude Mechanicals’ production of The Tempest, I told my friend Jay about how I was going to the funeral for Bob Davids. His jaw dropped, and he said, “The Bob Davids?! SABR Bob Davids?!” He then explained, in a calmness that only barely held back his percolating geek excitement, “There are three truly important things in baseball history. First was Babe Ruth. He changed how the game was played. The second was the uniting of the leagues. And the third… the third was Bob Davids.”
I may not have inherited my grandfather’s love of the game, but if there’s one trait we share, it’s our encyclopedic knowledge of trivia. Really useless information that excited and fascinates the hell out of us. And my grandfather’s love was for baseball history and statistics. His passion was so great that he sought out other enthusiasts and statisticians, founding the Society for American Baseball Research. He also formulated a whole system of calculating stats, a system that is still being used today by the major leagues to accurately predict how a minor league player will perform for the rest of his entire career. The man who could barely balance his checkbook was the same man revered as a god by the world of baseball for creating Sabermetrics.
When my mother, Edd, and I visited the Baseball Hall of Fame, we told the curator our relation to Bob Davids and we were subsequently treated like members of the royal family. We were given a personal tour of the museum, including the private rooms not open to the general public. We were taken to what was to have been christened “The Bob Davids Meeting Room” but my grandfather graciously declined their offer to have it be named after him.
Afterwards, we were taken down to the special climate-controlled archives downstairs to see the file they had on him. It was slim, just a profile and a few photographs, but the fact that they had one at all still greatly impresses us today. After his death, there was some talk of getting him inaugurated into the Hall, which would have made him the first “civilian” ever inducted, but we haven’t heard anything lately.
But even then, I was only barely aware of my grandfather’s rich past and current importance. I never knew that he explored Greenland, of all bloody places. I never knew his penchant to rewrite the lyrics of popular songs for comedy purposes, long before Weird Al came about (but around the Spike Jones era, for you fogies of the older persuasion). I never suspected the supposedly-legendary dry wit concealed behind those unassuming Iowa farmboy’s eyes. Even those very few times I went with him to Shepard’s Table to help feed the homeless, when some of those other volunteers went up to give their testimonials of his dedication to charity, even this was not the man I knew. This wasn’t my Bob Davids. Not this crusader, this comedian, this adventurer! To me, Bob Davids was one person and one person only. He was my Grandpa. Simple- and I emphasize “simple”- at that.
That’s not meant to be disparaging in the least, understand. It’s just how the man was to me all those years. Grandpa was a quiet old man with a soft voice, a gentle laugh, and a sneeze that could topple mountains and make Thor himself exclaim, “Dude, that’s loud!” Oh, and he snored, too. Good lord, yes. Loud, continuous snores, after which he would then stop for a few seconds, only to erupt in a huge snort so loud it would wake himself up.
This was the man who would take me on his knee and sing “You Are My Sunshine” to me. He’d reach up to the lamp next to the chair and hold onto the switch, so when he’d sing, “You make me happy, when skies are…” there was a klik-klik and the lights would go out, “… gray. You’ll never know dear, how much I love you, so please, don’t take my…” klik-klik “… sunlight away.”
This was the man I knew, the man who taught me to say “please” and “thank you,” wherever I go. The man who never liked to hear people swear or to take God’s name in vain, but never lectured them on it when they did either. It wasn’t his way to confront anyone like that. If he was offended, he would just stay strong, say nothing, and turn the other cheek. Gordon was right, he was a True Christian, and God knows there isn’t enough of his kind in the world. He was the man who loved us, even if he never said it. He loved us and he loved his wife.
He and Yvonne were married in 1952. He loved her thoroughly and never asked anything of her, save one thing. One single thing. He wanted a normal-sized wife. Slender would have been nice, but really, all he wanted was a woman of normal, average weight. She knew this.
Then my mother was born, and afterwards Yvonne proceeded to have miscarriage after miscarriage, each pregnancy lasting shorter than the last. After she lost the seventh child, she understandably fell into a deep depression. She gave up trying, and being a good Catholic girl, never slept with her husband again.
As much as she loved Bob, she also came to resent him. And one of the main sources of contention was the Davids family itself. Grandpa came from a big Iowa family, the kind that almost needs to rent out a convention center to hold a reuinion. When a relative would come by the visit, Grandpa would always offer up his home and hospitality to them. That's what families, especially those kinds of families, do. But Yvonne never understood that. She always accused the relatives of sponging off her husband (and by proxy, herself) and of being no-good vicious gossipers when they just liked to talk about what the rest of the family was up to, y'know?
She grew increasingly resentful and bitter, and turned all the depression and anger of the miscarriages against him. She felt utterly powerless, and yet she still had one way to control him. One way to exert power over him. She ate. And ate. And ate and never stopped, indulging in every single impulse to consume.
When my brother was one year old, he failed to pronounce “grandma” and instead took to calling her “dama.” Instead of correcting him, the name stuck and everyone, including my mother, has since called her Dama. So as I grew up, I also started calling her Dama.
These days, we sometimes call her “Dama the Hutt” behind her back.
If you think that’s unduly cruel, allow me to recount one little event that happened about a year after Grandpa died. Dama was living with us, that is Mother and me, a situation that didn’t suit any of us particularly well. One night, on the eve of Edd’s birthday, my mother comes into my room, weeping. I’m talking about the kind of crying that can mean one thing and one thing only.
“Oh my God,” I said, “Who died?”
Mom waved her hand, sat on my bed, and between sobs managed to say, “I just… I can’t be alone right now, I can’t. I… I… I was making a cake… for your brother’s birthday… and I… put the cake on the table, and I was g-going to ice it…”
“Oh no,” I said, anticipating a disaster all too familiar in our household. “One of the dogs ate it. Did Rosie get on her hind legs and eat the cake?”
Mom shook her head, and began to sob again.
“No,” she said, with a sudden burst of furious indignation. “Your grandmother!”
Now let me explain. My grandmother didn’t actually eat the cake. That’s not what happened. The cake itself was perfectly fine, just bare and naked because Dama ate the frosting. Now, when I say that my grandmother ate the frosting, I don’t mean she actually scraped the frosting off the cake and ate it. Lordy no, that’d just be pathetic and wrong. No, my grandmother ate the frosting right out of the container.
Now understand, this isn’t the yummy rich kind of frosting you’d buy at the supermarket. See, that I’d understand, since how many of us used to dream of just digging into a can of that stuff back when we were kids, right? But no, this was Ma’s home-made decorative cake frosting. The kind of frosting you’re not really supposed to eat too much of, that you’d scrape off to the side of the plate. That kind of frosting. And do you know what’s in home-made decorative cake frosting?
Two things, and two things only. Powdered sugar and Crisco. And we’re talking the whoooole blue bucket here. Imagine mixing those two ingredients together in a Tupperware container. Now imagine that container in my grandmother’s left hand, and a spoon in the other. Before you ask, no, we’re still not quite sure why she’s still alive either.
At that point, she’d been living with us for scarcely three months and already we were breaking down. Grandpa lived with this for thirty years and never said a word. Not a single word of protest or complaint, not even as he cooked for her and cleaned up after her, did all her laundry and all her shopping, washed and put away all her dishes. She still had a driver’s license, but she hadn’t driven a car since Carter was president. She never needed to, because Mr. Dave was her personal, faithful chauffer. Bertie Wooster never had it so good.
She just sat, watched TV, and preened over her tiny yipping Bichon Frise Mi-Mi, so often with that baby voice of hers that it eventually became her permanent speaking tone. She got larger and larger, peaking at 350 pounds at one point, and my grandfather never said a word against her. It’s hard to imagine and yet appallingly clear in my memory; this man-god to a whole culture and yet a slave, however willing, inside his own home. The man was a saint, and not just in the figurative sense either, as events would soon have it.
This seemingly-unshakeable status quo was forever altered when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Dama went though various modes of denial, always holding out to some doctor’s supposition that the lapses in memory were tied to a lack of certain vitamins or some mild genetic family trait. But genetics were no defense, as almost all of Grandpa’s brothers had already been diagnosed with the same disease, so this didn’t come as much of a shock to either of them.
Grandpa kept quiet about it as he had everything else in his life save for baseball, and tried to keep going about his life as he always had. Keeping up with S.A.B.R. correspondence, maintaining the useless property in Pennsylvania, dutifully serving her wife, but of course it couldn’t last for long. Although the deterioration was very gradual, it was also very noticeable, as was his own frustration. I think the worst part of the disease is the fact that the sufferer feels the memories slipping away, knows that they’re missing something, so of course they get angry and bitter.
Dama never really understood, or maybe she didn’t want to understand. She kept pressing and harassing him when he’d forget, as if her asking, “But don’t you remember…?” would actually rekindle the lost memory, but it only made him more upset. Before very long, it became clear to us that we were starting to lose him, to really lose him, and that the worst days for us all were still ahead.
He still insisted on flying out to Wisconsin to attend what would be his final S.A.B.R. convention. At the end of the first day, he became convinced that it was time to fly back to D.C. and would not listen to the protests of his colleagues and friends who kept insisting that there were still two more days of the convention.
Eventually, he won out and boarded a plane, but it wasn’t a plane to D.C. To this day, we still don’t know exactly where he went in those 24 hours that we completely lost him, but he eventually came to his senses enough to fly back to Wisconsin in time for the final day of the convention. Once there, he held one of his famous yellow-card baseball quizzes for his fellow S.A.B.R. members, his memory for baseball stats as sharp as ever.
We’re all convinced that had the Alzheimer’s progressed all the way, those stats would have been the very last things to go. Long after all the long-term memories of his two grandchildren, his wife, his one child, and his own childhood. So it really was a blessing, not even a mixed one, that it never got to that point.
The stairs at my grandparents’ house used to always be carpeted, but we were preparing to move them out eventually so the house needed some serious revisions if we were to even try to get it sold, so the old worn carpeting came off so we could paint the steps. Edd did the job himself, and when it was over Grandpa insisted on putting a plastic tarp over the steps. He and Edd argued over it, and eventually Edd acquiesced to our grandfather. To this day, a part of Edd still blames himself for what happened next.
A couple days later, Grandpa slipped and fell down the stairs. Whether he had the stroke before, after, or simultaneous with the fall is still uncertain. He went to the hospital, where they opened him up and discovered that the cancer that he had for a long time, the cancer that had gone into remission a year ago and was all right, had come back in full force and had riddled his body. So they just closed him back up.
Dama signed the “do not resuscitate” papers, and that was that. It was just a matter of waiting now, and we knew it wouldn’t be long. We also knew that between the Alzheimer’s, the coma, and the drugs they had him hopped up on, chances were he was already as good as gone. We’d never see him again. Edd had gone back to Seattle to be with his girlfriend Phoebe. I was back at Washington College, the second semester of my freshman year. Mom had to go to work and manage her own home as best as she could. So it was Dama, as of course it had to have been Dama, who was there by his side until the end.
She was there all three days, by his side, to hear his last words when he finally came out of unconsciousness for the final time. He opened his eyes, looked around through the haze, and she held his hand.
She asked her husband, “Do you know who I am?”
And he looked at her. He looked at this woman who he has served for decades, served because he loved her as a husband and as a Christian. And Bob Davids, the boy who had grown from humble Iowa beginnings… the Christian saint who served his fellow man never looking for anything in return… the parodist with the razor wit whose jokes had become the stuff of legend… the hero to millions who forever changed how the great American pastime was studied… the man who loved his family as much as he loved his own God… and the quietly devoted, loving husband to Yvonne Davids after years, years of service and dedication… he looked up at her and said, with quiet warmth:
“Yes. You’re Flabbo.”
And he died.
