Doug Larsen - A Portrait of My Grandfather

Illustration by Dell Harris

My earliest memory of Grampa was when I was about three years old. We were playing ball in his back yard with my older cousin Randy. Randy was five, and was pitching to me. I could hardly lift the bat, so Grampa was crouched down behind me, helping me hold it. Normally I didn’t like playing sports with Randy because he could do everything better than me. But I felt fine that time, because Grampa was there.

Randy threw the ball and I didn’t swing, which made him mad. “You’re supposed to hit the ball, Greg,” he yelled at me.

Since I was with Grampa, I felt safe in taunting him. “No,” I said.

“All right, I’m telling,” Randy announced, and stormed into the house.

I got a little worried when he slammed the door behind him, but then I looked back at Grampa. He smiled his slow, gentle, crinkle-eyed smile. “Now, see what you’ve done?” he said jokingly. “You’ve gotten us both in trouble.”

I smiled, and snuggled back in his arms. I wasn’t afraid with Grampa around.

I have a lot more memories of Grampa. And they all came flooding back to me one day when I was in eighth grade.

It was shaping up to be a pretty good day. I was sitting comfortably in Computer class. It was the only class I kind of liked, and the to-die-for Tiffany Montgomery, sitting across the aisle from me, had just crossed her legs in my direction. Not that she even knew I existed, much less which direction I was, but it was still nice to sit there, pretending to concentrate on the computer screen, but actually looking her over out of the comer of my eye.

She was wearing one of those short-short-short black leather skirts that all the popular girls wore, and was casually twirling a lock of her long, teased hair in her right hand. I didn’t care much for her choice in hairstyles, but I had to admit she added up to a phenomenal package.

There was a lull in the class as the teacher got busy at her projected computer screen. Tiffany looked around at Brad Andrews, sitting in front of me. Brad was a casual friend of mine, but at the moment, I hated him because Tiffany was looking at him.

“Hey, Andrews!” she whispered.

Brad looked at her, surprised.

She smiled sweetly. “Faggot!” she hissed.

Brad visibly recoiled in shock and surprise. He furrowed his brow, and then turned back to his computer without saying anything. I snickered uncomfortably along with everyone else within hearing range, and tried to slide inconspicuously lower in my chair. Don’t look my way, I pleaded silently. Just leave me alone!

Tiffany seemed done. She smiled with satisfaction, and went back to ignoring everyone.

The door opened, and the assistant principal came into the room.

Everyone in class looked up with interest. The assistant principal was the enforcer in the school, and if he was here, somebody was in for it.

He went up to our teacher, and they whispered for a minute. Then the teacher looked up over the class—and pointed straight to me!

Everyone turned to see who she was pointing at, and I turned beet red. Who? Me? I didn’t do anything! Don’t look at me—look anywhere else!

The assistant principal motioned me to the front of the room. “Bring your things,” he instructed. I obeyed, feeling more and more dread.

I walked out of the room with him. “I—I didn’t do anything,” I croaked.

“I know you didn’t,” the assistant principal said. “Come on into my office for a minute.”

I followed him blindly. He led me into his office and had me sit down.

“Greg,” he said gently, and suddenly I felt even worse. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

I stared at him helplessly. If he thought it was bad news, then it was really, really bad news. Like, adult-bad news.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” he continued, “but I’m afraid your Grandfather Al Melfred, has died.”

Grampa? Dead? I stared at him numbly, paralyzed by shock. Grampa? Why, I saw him just two days ago! He looked great! I know he had a weak heart, but still…

“Your dad is coming to pick you up,” he went on. “He wants you to be with your mom and grandmother, and help him give them some support.”

Grampa was dead. He couldn’t be. I followed the assistant principal numbly as he led me down the hall and sat with me on a bench by the main door until my dad pulled up. Numbly, I walked over and got into the car.

“Hi.” I said tonelessly.

“How are you holding up?” Dad asked.

“OK.”

We rode in silence for awhile.

“Grampa died of a heart attack,” Dad said quietly. “He was doing his virtual reality medication, and his heart just seized up on him.”

Virtual reality medication. I remembered when Grampa saw me playing my first virtual game. I was so excited, because it was so much better than the video games I was used to, and I wanted Grampa to play it with me. But he just smiled gently and shook his head.

“It sounds great,” he told me, “but I’m a little too old to be doing adventure games. You do those programs, and I’ll do the relaxing ones.”

One of the neat things about Grampa was that he made virtual reality programs. He was a big-shot project manager and chief programmer until he retired, and had produced many of the hottest virtual reality programs on the market. He’s the one that really got me into programming, and we’d sit for hours, side by side, hacking around. I loved it, and Grampa was a good teacher. By the time I started serious computer classes in school, I was light-years ahead of everyone else.

One of the first real applications of virtual reality was when an architectural firm designed a building on its computer, and then hooked up a treadmill and a pair of goggles to the computer. The client was able to walk on the treadmill, look through the goggles, and see the building, as if it had really been built. But things had improved a lot since then. Through a connection between the goggles and your brain, the computer programs in virtual reality now felt really real.

I’d heard about some of them: virtual pom disks that I was pretty sure I disapproved of, but was really curious about anyway. If they felt anywhere near as real as my space battle programs, then yowzah!

But anyway, Grampa’s virtual medication was a program called Virtual Meadow. In Virtual Meadow, you stood on your treadmill with your goggles on, and you felt for all the world like you were in this meadow, without another person around for miles. It didn’t matter where you really were—in a virtual booth in a mall, or renting a room in one of the new virtual motels—it felt like you were in the meadow. Grampa let me try it once. He said it was the most relaxing thing he’d ever experienced, and I agreed, although it was also kinda boring. But he didn’t think so. And his doctor said that if he were to spend an hour a day in Virtual Meadow, it could really help his heart and reduce the drugs he had to take.

I looked at my dad. “So the Virtual Meadow stuff didn’t help Grampa, huh?”

“I guess not. He had the heart attack while he was using his Virtual Meadow medication. I guess when your heart decides to seize up, it’s going to do it.”

I sat there in numb misery. It wasn’t possible that Grampa was dead. It just wasn’t. Pretty soon, I was sure, I’d wake up and have to shake off this terrible dream.