Just like Frank Slade Would've

A few minutes ago I saw that one of Bethlehem Steel's buildings is on fire. My very first thought was, that wouldn't have happened on Frank Slade's watch. And then, I walked outside to see what Doug was doing. I found him sprinkling a light layer of topsoil on the front lawn.

There have been countless times I've said to Doug, as I did a couple minutes ago, "Yep, that's something Frank Slade would've done." For anyone who hasn't already figured it out, the character of Gus in the Linger series is based on my grandfather.

He was a man who took care of things. He was gruff and crotchety, stubborn, intransigent, and sometimes very, very difficult to get along with. However, even at his worst, he was loving, kind, generous and caring. He would've given the shirt off his back to anyone who needed it, but would have done it in a way that no one knew about it, and also in a way that everyone would've assumed the shirt belonged to the other person all along.

I remember living in my first apartment as an adult, and could not believe how filthy the windowsills were. What most would see as normal, I did not. I've said often, you could eat off the windowsills in my grandparents' house, because it was true. Everything was cared for. Everything worked, if it didn't it was fixed. Everything was "in its place," a blessing and a curse that has followed me all my days.

Things were done a certain way in their house. Dinner was served at the dinner table. So was breakfast and lunch. That table was in the dining room. When he built their house, he told my grandmother that there would never be a table in the kitchen. There were other standards that the two of them were intransigent about. Order was a priority. As much as things were done a certain way, there were also things that were simply not done. 

Another story I've told my kids, and often laughed about, was bed making. I was about to crawl into bed one night, I was probably less than ten years old, and I hadn't put the top sheet on the bed when I made it. My grandmother hastily stripped the blankets off, put the top sheet on, and remade the bed. She mumbled the entire time, but I couldn't hear a word she said. Except one, "chaos." To this day I think about the partially made bed, and hear my grandmother saying, "without order, there's chaos." She never said those words, it just makes me laugh.

Doug recently finished redoing the garage. He patched and sanded walls, painted walls and ceilings, hung everything that could be hung, and built a storage loft complete with more implements from which to hang things. But the first thing he did, after he finished painting, was put up the various brackets and shelves for Frank's paddle boards and equipment. First. It's something Frank Slade would've done.

While Doug doesn't care much about whether we have dinner at the dinner table,  otherwise, he's very much like Frank Slade. He researches how things should be done, like preparing a lawn for winter, or when trees should be planted, or pruned, or what needed to be done to get the whole-house humidifiers ready for winter. He made sure the fireplaces both lit, and that the furnaces filters were changed, and asked me to double-check the thermostat programming so the the air conditioner doesn't come on once he's covered it for the winter.

In the last few months, I've insisted the kids help with the various projects Doug undertakes, not only because kids should help around the house, but also because they'll learn their father's approach. How he doesn't do things the easiest or fastest way, he does them the right way. Just like Frank Slade would've.