Another Morning

Another morning, and he was like the image of the Amitaba Buddha, hands folded and eyes closed behind heavy lenses, slouched in his well worn armchair. There was always the strangest warm glow in his office—a golden illumination of perfect incandescent bulbs, some from under old yellowed lampshades. The lighting was harmonized by the continual fuzzy hum, background static of a transistor radio frequency.
My legs and velcro buckle shoes dangled off the seat of a small black stool that sqeaked when it rolled. Listening as I dug into a bowl of cereal or just watched admiring through the gentle blue eyes of boyhood. Grandpa had a creased forehead and dark gray hair back then, freckles and weathered skin wrapped over his brawny forearms and hands.  The aroma of old spice hung in the air and I was happy.  Frenzies of broken voices chattered back and forth about all kinds of things I knew nothing of. Like, “Oh no Dean, not at all, if my memory still stands true to me, that legislation was passed back in Nixon’s term,” or something to that effect. The buzzing would break as he would lean over his belly and press down the microphone button, chiming in to the conversational chaos with his precise relaxed control; the noise of silence beneath his resonant voice.
I wished I could know the origin of the genius his words declared, which was as ancient to me as the historical mystery of the possessions that filled the shelves and cluttered the desktops. It was a technological room of foreign reality, a mecca of mechanical engineering and scientific discovery. (Meters and manuals and amplifiers and filing cabinets and monitors, floppy disks, wires, tapes, glues, oils, batteries, bolts, screwdrivers and ratchet sets, left over micro chips, fuses, adapters, and switches, and huge stacks of paper from old model printers.)
His cat, sprawled over sections of the morning’s newspaper in her fluffy disposition, would let out a grumble when he ran the brush through her matted fur. And all the dialogue never ended, going on for what seemed like ham radio eternity, though he was always aware: keen to so many words floating on waves in electromagnetic space. When the Breakfast Club had finally all spoken he would interject with his wisdom once more, mentioning my name and bidding farewell to his call-letter friends as he set down his coffee mug. “Goodbye all, WB5MVC signing out.” Another morning, and it was time for school again.