Primus inter pares, or, Eulogizing Grandpa Weaselo

Good evening. Due to recent personal events, in lieu of our usual frivolity, we bring this piece. My grandfather (aka Grandpa Weaselo) passed away in his sleep early Thursday morning. He was 88. Also, I’d be remiss to not say I lovingly stole chunks of the biographical details from Hermana Weaselo, with her permission or at least her “I’m glad it resonated well enough to use it” acceptance.

It’s easy to say if not for X, Y, or Z, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing right now. Sure, there’s chaos theory, butterfly effect, and all that. But I can definitely say that about my grandfather (and no, not because of direct ancestor). Because of Christmas 1995, where he gave me my first violin, and I’ve been playing ever since. Or Christmas 2007, where he saw I had been downstairs playing around with his violin from Romania and finally passed it down to me, a Christmas present come full circle.

He was born to an affluent family in Bucharest, Romania. His father was an architect who built churches still standing today, and his grandfather had one of the largest tanneries in Romania, I believe after one day going to a local Macedonian swimming hole, coming back home, and seeing that his entire family had been murdered due to local Greek/Macedonian skirmishes.

They lost everything once the country fell under Soviet control. His parents (my great grandparents) were imprisoned for refusing to forfeit traditional gold coins from his and his brother’s baptisms. He and my grandma married in 1958, and eventually they decided it was for the best to leave the only home they ever knew and start a new life in the US. They had to take the scenic route since there was no direct path to the States at that point. 9 months pregnant and political refugees, they made it to Beirut, Lebanon in November 1962 to a diaspora of Armenians and Romanians, where my father was born shortly after.

They didn’t have much when they left, especially because Grandpa was barred from finishing university due to being very vocally against the Communist party. (He would remain staunchly anti-Communist for the rest of his days, and you shouldn’t have gotten him started on his thoughts on Stalin.) One time, he was blindfolded and taken to tune a piano. Ceaucescu’s piano. Fortunately he did a good enough job.

He was also an excellent violin player and made ends meet freelancing with orchestras and ensembles, first in Bucharest, then in Beirut. The day my father was born, my grandpa won a job playing with the orchestra in Beirut, on a loaner violin. (His violin didn’t make it to Beirut, and didn’t come back to him until he was in the States—it has the customs stamp to show it.)

The young family made their way to the US in August 1963 and faced a very different type of life. They didn’t speak English, so they took classes to help them learn the language and assimilate while he took hard jobs. One day, he met up with his friend who was a dishwasher. While helping wash and dry the dishes, he was told to scrub the toilets instead, and that hurt. They made 15¢ a day or so (1962/63 amounts), and he’d walk dozens of blocks to save a few cents on the train fare every day (even if he then spent it on cartons of cigarettes—that he shockingly decided to quit cold turkey one day and never went back).

Eventually, Grandpa got a job at Steinway & Sons, the piano company, where he put his studies of engineering to good use, built and tuned pianos, and developed multiple patents for them, while my grandmother, a mechanical engineer, went on to have a successful career of her own, working on things such as the lunar module. They traveled extensively with my dad and, once he was born, my uncle (his younger brother), and then later on took me or my sister to places such as Hershey Park, Lake George, and time and time to our “usual” areas, Hunter, Tannersville, and Kaaterskill Falls, in the Catskills, home to mini-golf, fishing, and hotel pool swimming.

There are dozens if not hundreds of absolutely fantastic stories. Stories my sister and I weren’t around for, like the “pigeon story.” Stories we were around for, like not liking ice in his water and casually taking them out of the glass and tossing them… on top of a vent. In a multi-story restaurant. The people downstairs, who the ice was melting on top of, thought it was raining or there was a leak. Or getting pulled over by a Quebecois cop for speeding and never paying the ticket and possibly not being allowed back in Canada (the ticket was eventually forgiven by the powers that be and it should have been an easy dismissal—the cop wrote down the wrong thing as the car model). Or saying really dirty things under his breath at a Turkish restaurant visiting my sister. In Turkish. My grandmother was appalled and convinced they were going to spit in their food, because Turkish has some damn good swears.

Yes, if you couldn’t tell, he was a bit of a wiseass. Juuust enough to keep him out of serious trouble. Barely. With both the powers that be and with my grandmother.

We’re lucky to have gotten more time with him—after my grandmother died it seemed like he wanted to follow suit. He went to their apartment in Pompano Beach, FL one time to “clear his head” and, in true Weaselo family fashion, when I went to pick him up from the airport his phone was picked up by a police officer (a Port Authority PD officer letting me know that he had complaints of shortness of breath on the flight and they were there to check on him and then take him to the hospital). In his later years, he tried to educate my sister and me on our family tree, and I can only regret that I retained nowhere near enough of what he said and the accompanying pictures, no matter how many times he’d call me over from the couch in the last year plus that I’d spent with him in Apartment Weaselo. There were a lot of names very quickly, and a lot of architects, artists, and doctors, as I previously mentioned. The good news is that no, I am not mandated to know this as the eldest, plus Hermana Weaselo’s the one more into going through all the lineage. (She did 23AndMe or Ancestry one year for Christmas.) I was requested to try and take care of things with the grandkids in terms of support, but I’ll admit due to youth orchestras when younger and then actual work now that I’m older, that’s been more of a soft “power,” at best. I don’t know if my cousins actually care about what I have to say, I’d say it’s a maybe. At most. I’ll live. In terms of being the oldest, I feel it more with myself and Hermana Weaselo, and that’s what counts.

As for now, he’s at peace, finally reunited with his beloved wife of 60 years, no longer in pain, no longer heartbroken. As for now, if I still had any trepidations or unsureness about it, I’ve officially taken up the mantle of Buhai’s keeper, the instrument that’s been in our family for over a century, his violin from Romania, customs stamp and all, to keep and to pass down someday.

His favorite composer was Fritz Kreisler, and Kreisler’s been what’s been playing in my head the past week or two as a result. To the man I owe two-thirds of my name… thank you, and rest well.

Te iubesc.