I’ve been trying this week to conjure up some recollections of my Granddad, who passed away on Saturday. It’s hard, however, to work up so many old memories in such a short time, and my mind seems to keep latching on to just a few things. The moment I try to take one memory and have it lead me to another the bubble of concentration seems to burst and I’m left with just the original feeling. But these few feelings I have right now are so full and so vivid in my mind they seem to paint him so perfectly just on their own. Of course this picture I’ve made of him is from just my perspective - my mom (his daughter), my sister, my dad, my aunts and uncles and cousins, my Grandma most of all, and everyone who loved him will each have their own portrait to conjure up as well, and I look forward to the stories and other recollections we’ll all share when we meet to celebrate his life in a couple days.
The first thing I think of is the pipe smoke, and its smell. All through my younger years, he smoked a pipe every night. He would sit in that old chair in the den, in that house in Bloomington IL, bang out the ashes of last night’s smoke, fill the pipe with tobacco, light it up, and sit back. Just pure tranquility. And the den, the house would fill with that smell, that sweet and biting pipe tobacco smell. I’ve always loved that smell. If you were lucky, I mean really lucky, you got to hold the match and help him light it. Sometimes we would take the whole show outside to the porch and feel the Illinois heat, listen to the crickets and the cicadas and all the other evening critters, and let the scent waft into the neighborhood of E. Grove St.
He ate vanilla ice cream for dessert at every lunch. Not dinner. Lunch.
When he could still drive, back in Illinois, his little green station wagon had this bumper sticker on the back: “Member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.” Kind of joking…kind of serious. Loved it.
It seemed when we (me, sister, cousins) were really little he always took us two places: the library and the zoo. He volunteered at the library, and I think he liked to show off his grandkids to all of his friends. I don’t know if he took us to the zoo or if we dragged him along, but we went alot. It wasn’t much of a zoo, but it was fun, perfectly sized for one granddad and some anxious kids. And (I think) we’d walk through the nearby park afterwards.
He loved trains, and science, and all things mechanical and electrical. He did work at GE for all those years after all. I’m sure his knowledge of trains and train engines could beat out just about anyone else’s. And it wasn’t just the mechanics - he just loved to watch them roll by. To watch him you’d think nothing was finer in this world than watching a train go by. Even later on…or more recently I should say, when some of his mental faculties were stolen away from him, he still devoured any and all books given to him that had to do with trains, or science. Or mysteries, for that matter. The last time I saw him - haven’t thought of it that way yet - he had just gotten a book of photographs from the Hubble telescope. I was very jealous. And he lit up when I explained the work I do now with solar energy, explained how a PV module works, how we convert the DC to AC…I think he was impressed I knew what I was talking about.
One more thing is, whenever I saw him, he would greet me with a handshake and a “Jackson.” It was the sort of greeting where you could tell he was being funny but also completely serious. I think that says a lot. And no one called me Jackson back then. For a long time I thought it was a silly name - I’ve since embraced it - but the way he said it, it made me feel proud.
Well, that’s just a little bit about Ken Burrell, a few things to remember him by.
