o.p.p. | mathew gruber

to attempt on such a young night to dissect the complicated love between a humbled tyrant and his wincing distant brood, would be as low an insult to the reader as it would be to the subjects. and besides, in this field, 28 years is far too short a study to turn up more than arrogant presumptions. so instead of fumbling your introduction to my grandfather with tentative adjectives of praise and my usual general superfluousness, i got you these photos -- his visible forms -- that speak a various sign language all their own. in a stranger's eye they inventory arbitrary accumulations, strange inventions and elaborate amateur customizations, making maps of his fun house and the faded punctuations of his early life.

in ours, who've had more tours of the basement than they've had birthdays, it's what's left of the cushions around the hard-edged evidences of his existence that stand out. those things of hers, those she's survived by, that have also lived through the last regime change to become his. the survivors -- the orchids blocking david's sword, the bronze-dipped shoes paperweighting aarp pamphlets and temple brochures, the awkward grandkids framed and hung among ancestral portraits, the cats in the koi pond, the diet coke -- slip inside the harshest of wrinkles and soften his definition. to seamlessly and most profoundly be his better half, with or without her, and to say things like "i know" and "i'm sorry" and mean them. well, so much for skipping the arrogant presumptions, eh? better that we just look at the photos.











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