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think much beyond it. “He is a really smart man,” said my other, more reflective grandfather of Grandpa, “if only he were more thoughtful.”
    Still, it was he who had engineered the maintenance job for Grandpa and steered him towards it, almost, it seems, like the vocational guidance teacher, looking at the job and looking at the student and deciding (and hoping) that each might prove suitable for the other.
    For his part, Grandpa would say, “I know
one thing
really well and that’s how to run this hospital. That’s enough for me.”
    During their early married years, it seems, it was decided that Grandpa would earn whatever he could, and that he would then give everything there was to Grandma, except for a small allowance for tobacco and beer. She would then do almost everything else, which was no small accomplishment, considering that during their first twelve married years they produced nine living children. Before “the chance,” the earnings were erratic and unpredictable and Grandma was frequently hard-pressed, but after it, she too, like her husband, felt “all set for life,” and after her early years of “making do” with little, she felt privileged and almost “rich” beyond any of her earliest expectations. She was frugal and capable because, as she said, “I always had to be,” putting patches on the patches and hardly ever throwing anything away. And she believed with great dedication in a series of maxims. “Waste not, want not” was one, and “Always look after your blood” was another.
    “He is the nicest man you could ever be around,” she frequently said of Grandpa. “And I should know. I have been sleeping with him for more than forty-five years. Some men,” she would add in ominous seriousness, “are nice as pie in public but within their own homes they are mean and miserly to those who have to live with them all the time. No one, perhaps, knows this except those who are captives within their houses. But he is never like that at all,” she would add, brightening at the very thought. “He is always cheerful and happy, and there is more to him than some people think.”

I
think of my grandparents a great deal, and, as in the manner of the remembered Gaelic songs, I do not do so consciously. I do not awake in the morning and say, as soon as my feet hit the floor, “Today I
must
remember Grandma and Grandpa. I will devote
ten whole minutes
to their memory” – as if I were anticipating isometric exercises or a self-imposed number of push-ups to be done on the floor beside my bed. It does not work that way at all. But they drift into my mind in the midst of the quiet affluence of my office, where there is never supposed to be any pain but only the creation of a hopeful beauty. And they drift into the quiet affluence of my home, with its sunken living room and its luxuriously understated furniture. And they are there too on Grand Cayman or in Montego Bay or Sarasota or Tenerife or any of those other places to which we go, trying to pretend that, for us, there really is no winter. They drift in like the fine snow in the old
Calum Ruadh
house in which my brothers used to live; sifting in and around the window casings or under the doors, driven by the insistent and unseen wind, so that in spite of primitive weather stripping or the stuffing with old rags, it continued to persist, forming lines of quiet whiteness to be greeted with surprise.
    I see my grandparents even now, in terms of their gestures and certain scenes. The way she would touch his inner thigh frombehind, as he stood on the ladder, helping her with the spring housecleaning, which he hated but always did; and the way his knees would buckle at the surprise of the touch until he had composed himself and was able to turn, laughing, towards her, looking down from his ladder while holding the curtain rod or the cleaning cloth in his hand.
    As they became older and he became somewhat deaf, they reverted almost totally to