Grandpa

One day a few years ago,  my grandpa and I went to his friend’s farm to hunt rabbits which was my first time hunting rabbits, and it ended well and i got to learn alot about him and who he once was.

So it all started when my grandpa jack showed up in his old rusty dodge d100 truck and had already asked if I wanted to go hunting and I had already said yes. Then we get out to the farm and we get the guns out and load them. Now we are walking up to the gate to the cow pasture and to get the gate to open you had to make a little lever with a stick to get the bungee cord undone. As we walk  into the cow pasture by the brush pile where we would sit for a little bit because it's a ⅕ mile walk from the farm down there. We had passed a lot of cows and the stench of cow manure was super strong that day and it rained earlier that morning and it hurt to breath through your nose so I plugged it and started to remember old rock and roll in my head and that helped me get the stench out of my mind then I pulled out a bag of chips and a soda and ate the chips and drank the soda. As we started to walk again into the woods this time and I seen something move and it was a rabbit so I shot at it and didn’t hit it which made me angry at myself because usually i don't miss and the rabbit ran away never to be seen again. So we kept on walking then we seen a hill and said let’s go up it but the hill was steeper than we thought and it didn't help with the rain from the morning because now everything is muddy but that didn't stop us from climbing to the top. When we got to the top we saw a deer on the other field about 100 yards away eating some hay then we heard a noise to our left and went over to it to find out it was a tree branch moving so we broke it off. Then turned around and seen three rabbits and he looked at me and just could tell that i had seen rabbits because of how excited i was to shoot them and i shot all three not missing a single shot. Then we looked down at the clock and seen it was getting close to 4pm and decided to go back to the farmhouse to cook some rabbit.. The cow manure stench was still horrible and went up to the house where grandpa washed the rabbit down with water and prepared it the way he used to back when he was young. I remember one of the stories he used to tell me all the time mainly because i would always ask for it and every time he would tell the story the same way each time so he remembered it good so good it made us think it wasn't real but i remember what he said every time

¨Now grandkid listen up i'm going to tell you a story¨ said Grandpa

¨The year was 1931 and i was just born i was my dad's first and my moms 2nd one now growing up i had 6 siblings and life wasn't easy but it also wasn't very hard because my parents were always there for me¨ grandpa stated and he always started the story like this every time but he never told us this story before so we listened with full attention

¨ I was just about to turn 20 but i had decided that i would go to war and serve my country and i was damn proud to because well it's america and i feel like everyone should serve that can because it it a privilege to be an american.¨

¨ My unit was huge but over the past few weeks it has been slimming down alot lately I remember one day in particular because of how bad the insects were and the fact that i almost died that day we woke up at around id say 5 or 5:30am and the day started pretty normal and we had a pretty normal day until overhead we had heard a helicopter so we looked up at it and as soon as we did that we watched that helicopter get blown up in midair and parts and pieces were flying everywhere but that wasn't the worst part that was after we went to the biggest piece of the helicopter and worst of all we found the remains there. They were burned to the point where you couldn't tell who they were.¨ siad grandpa¨The pilot's face was completely burned off but that wasn't as bad as the co pilots his was worse because he still had skin but it looked like it was melting cheese on a pizza It was not a good sight i'll tell ya that for sure i'll still see his face at night some times and god i just wish that i could get the image out of my head.¨exclaimed grandpa

Now i had known that my grandpa was a veteran but i didn't know what he exactly did and how bad it actually was. It turns out that he basically went thru hell but even tho he did i asked him

¨Do you still think everyone should serve still even after all you had gone thru?¨

¨Yes i do but only if the person is mentally stable because even though i get flashbacks i've never flipped out on anything or anyone.¨ He replied with

After that i noticed that he was starting to get emotional and just went quiet so i didn't ask him anymore questions about the war because i didn't want to be the one that makes his ptsd any more worse. But this was also the first time he stopped without finishing the story but it's okay because i've heard it multiple times.

After grandpa had said that and went silent i asked him how life was once he got back home and he asked me what i meant and the only thing i could think of was how was just general everyday life. After a while of him sitting there and thinking he finally started to say something “Do you want to hear about all the cars i had and what happened to them all?” I instantly responded with “yea!” because i love cars and every thing to do with  cars. “Now listen here i've been working on cars ever since i was 13 i helped my dad.” And that really relates to me because i started to help my dad work on vehicles when i was young. Grandpa started off by saying “Now the first year i had got my license i had totaled 10 cars and they just weren't any random old car they were the ones i used to help my dad work on and he was mad at me but not as bad as my mom she wanted to kill me before the car could because it seemed like id get a car make it go fast then total it and she kept yelling at me saying that one day your gonna kill yourself driving the cars like that but my dad had enough trust in me that he kept buying junk cars and fixing them up for me”

Right after he had said that we had heard a knock on the door so he got up and answered the door and it was my uncle who used to have the fastest car that i've ever seen he had a 1974 buick regal with a chevy 350 in it that he took out of a truck and the transmission as well and that car was fast! He got a ticket rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital doing close to 170 mph because the cops were only able to do estimated speed time arrival and they estimated the speed around 170 and when he passed the cops the cop radioed  in the description of the car fast and small tail lights. Now it's me my uncle and grandpa sitting at the kitchen table while im listening they are going off telling eachother stories about whatever they could think of but i was getting pretty bored so i decided to ask about more cars and trucks and surprisingly my uncle and grandpa at the same time agreed with me that they would talk about cars so i got happy. My uncle started off by saying that he used to have a older pontiac grand prix. My dad and him redid the whole car and i have the pictures somewhere around here because he knows i love everything about cars so he gave me them. My grandpa at that time interrupted him “remember the old buick you had?

“Yes” my uncle said

“That car was the fastest car i've ever been in because when i had first bought it it was a pooch so it had no power and then i was driving it back home one day and blew it up so i had to go find a new engine to put in it and that's where your grandpa helped me out because he had an old truck with a running engine and transmission so i swapped them and created a monster of a car i remember when my ex kelly was pregnant with your older cousin i got in that car and drove non stop to the hospital and on the way there somebody called the cops and there was one up on the road i was racing down and he pulled out and was maxed out at 128 MPH and i flew right passed him like he was standing still and when i had arrived at the hospital the cop was like 4 miles away so i waited for him to show up and he instantly wanted me to open the hood of the car because a few weeks before a race engine went missing but i just had the oil soaked chevy truck engine sitting in it and the most surprising part about that car was the estimated time speed arrival was 170 MPH but i still had like ¼ throttle left so i really didn't know how fast it went and i ended up with alot of tickets that night but then the next day after leaving my house i was on my way to get a new power steering pump because the one that was on it looked like it got shot by a 12 gauge and there were just parts and pieces everywhere but i only made it a block and i got pulled over and they tried to do anything to get the car off the road because the police knew they had nothing that was as fast as this car”

At this point i was completely mind blown and was getting kind of tired but i wanted to hear about my grandpas old crown vic and next thing i knew he was starting to say

“That car was the best car i ever had but i was the only one that could drive it because of the steering being so sensitive out of your 5 uncles and your dad they couldn't drive it to save their own lives if they depend on it”

At that point i was so tired that i just fell asleep and when i woke up my uncle was gone and my grandma was making me breakfast and after that my dad showed up and was ready to go home. Right before i left my grandpa handed me something. It was the pictures of his old crown vic he looked at me and said

“Take good care of them because they are the only ones i have”

After hearing my grandpa say that was like hearing someone say they are proud of you because of what u love to do.