Adrian Marshall, 23 August 1917 – 5 November 2007

It seems fitting that I should be writing this today, on Veteran’s Day. My grandfather was a veteran; he served as an army doctor in WWII. Family lore has it that he was in the second wave of soldiers associated with the D-Day landings. I don’t actually know if this is true, as I never, ever heard him talk about his war experiences. Once I did get him to play poker with me, and he beat me quite quickly. So take that for what you will: either I’m a lousy player, or he had a lot of time in the Army to become very good. Or both.

More than being a veteran, he was my veteran. Back before things got complicated with this war or the last war – and back before I realized that all wars are inherently complicated – I knew enough to know to appreciate his service.

I want to jump right in to telling stories, but I feel like I first need to provide some background, so that those of you who never met my grandfather can have a sense of the bigger picture. However, I can only share his life as I understood and remember it, which may not, of course, be the “actual version of the truth” as others recall it. So be it.

My grandfather grew up in New York City. I want to say he grew up in Brooklyn, but, again, I don’t really know. I remember him telling me how he was sick as a child and how his mother used to take him into the city on the subway for his asthma treatments. This is pretty ironic, considering that he grew up to be a champion track runner, and a serious contender during the time when the U.S. boycotted the 1936 Berlin Olympics. I’ve been told he ran the 400m and the 800m.

He attended Ohio University for one year, until he was caught fudging his residency status by using a cousin’s address (I only heard this story for the first time this year). After this, he transferred to Penn State and ran track for them. He graduated early from college, and was too young (I’ve also heard this story as “too Jewish”) to be admitted immediately to an American medical school. (I realize that he must have gone to medical school somewhere in here, but I’ve never heard him or anyone else tell stories about this portion of his life). He took a fellowship in tropical diseases in Beirut, Lebanon (where he met my grandmother, but that’s another story for another day). He and my grandmother returned to the U.S. via an empty troop transport ship that had brought American soldiers to Europe in the early days of America’s involvement in WWII. He enlisted shortly thereafter. As he spoke both French and German, he was a very useful doctor, and stayed in Europe with the Army for a full year after the German surrender.

Upon his return to the U.S., he and my grandmother moved to Meredith, New Hampshire. He was the only doctor in that small town. According to my mother, he was an excellent diagnostician; he didn’t have the benefit of colleagues, and when he sent a patient to “the big city” (Boston) for specialized care, he always did so with all of the proper preliminary studies completed. In the early 1960s, the family, now with four daughters, moved out to La Jolla, California. My grandfather continued to practice medicine there until I was a young child. He was well-liked, and more than a few of his patients later became my mother’s patients.

After he retired, he hiked and skied, visiting the Sierras often. He had a royal blue Roffe ski jacket that he wore with black pants and Nordic socks. In La Jolla, he walked on the beach, but he never really loved the beach or swimming. This was always explained to me by the fact that he was “a city boy,” but that doesn’t explain his love for the mountains. Or his strong support for environmental causes.

My grandfather wasn’t a perfect person, but one of the blessings of being a grandchild of someone is that you have a little more opportunity to have good experiences—and to selectively remember these experiences. He was complex, like everyone.

And, now, for the stories . . . that is, those of you that are still reading. . . .

My grandfather liked politics. He watched three newscasts every night (local, national network, and public television), Charlie Rose, and all the Sunday morning talk shows. I have a vivid memory of watching the McNeil/Lehrer Newshour (as it was called back then) with him the day it debuted. My grandfather had a very specific ritual for watching the news: he would have either pretzels (hard, unsalted) or nuts (unsalted, of course) and one drink. In the summer, it was a gin and tonic; in the winter, it was a martini. My grandfather kept a Kikkoman soy sauce bottle (the kind with the flat lid that pours droplets from both sides) filled with vermouth on the coldest shelf of the fridge so that he could make his martinis just right.

I remember calling him up during the first day of the Clinton impeachment trial (we were both watching it live at our respective houses). We agreed that Asa Hutchinson was having a heck of time getting his point across. My grandfather had a certain noise he would often make in response to politics or other things that disappointed him. It was a cross between a tsk-tsk and a click-click, and he always shook his head when he made the noise. Sometimes this was followed by a “come now” or an “oh, come now” to encourage wayward individuals to come to their senses.

He liked Molly Ivins, Mark Russell, and the (pre-Tina Brown) New Yorker.

My grandfather had integrity. These two stories aren’t mine so much as family legend, but they exemplify a man who stood by his principles. Once, while on the track team at Penn State, the team traveled to West Point for a meet. Penn State had at least one African-American on their team, and when the team arrived at West Point, they were told that it was a whites-only track. My grandfather (as captain of the team?) turned the Penn State team right around, stating that the whole team was going to run or no one was going to run at all. Penn State forfeited the meet. Later, when the family was new to La Jolla, someone came to the door with a petition to stop an African-American family from moving in to the neighborhood. My grandfather reportedly shut the door in the woman’s face.

My grandfather was a pipe smoker. He smelled not of stale smoke, but of a dark tobacco, tinged with cinnamon and pepper. In my mind, I’ve swirled this smell together with that of his evening drink for a very special eau de grandpère.

My grandfather loved me. I remember that I was in first grade and I got chicken pox the week my cousin Skye was born. My grandparents had both flown out to see their newest grandchild. I got sick when my mom was working full-time with very little schedule flexibility. My grandfather flew back to take care of me. Another time (or the same time?) I remember being at my grandparents’ house when I was sick with a terrible cough. My grandparents didn’t have a humidifier, so they boiled water in the tea kettle on the stove and tried to get me to breathe in the steam from the tea kettle. Except I was terrified of the steam. I remember my grandfather putting his face down next to mine, his beard scratching me, just to show me it was safe to breathe the steam swirling out of the tea kettle.

I must have been ten or eleven(?) when I wrote the following note to him, which he kept on his desk to this day:

He always kept fruit-flavored British hard candy (the kind that comes in a tin and is berry-flavored) in his car.

I also remember my grandparents stepping up, at the last minute, to chaperone my AP biology class in high school to the Wild Animal Park. My grandmother often volunteered (or was volunteered) for things like that, but this time we needed two chaperones. I don’t remember anything we saw that day, but I love this picture of the two of them that I took that day:

And here’s a picture taken a few months later, on the day I returned from a high-school exchange program to Switzerland:Right before I moved to Seattle, my grandfather and I went to see the movie “Sunshine” together. Despite the cheery title, the movie told the story of a Jewish family in Austria just before the Holocaust. I don’t remember anything about the experience of watching the movie with him, but I do remember that he later told my mom that he was awfully surprised that I didn’t have any questions about that time for him. Just what did he think I’d been studying all those years?

In the summer, my grandfather would sit outside and eat sardines or herring for lunch. Although he almost always had iced coffee (leftover from breakfast, of course), I remember one especially hot summer when he introduced me to a root beer float.

Every holiday my grandfather would carve the turkey using an impossibly dull electric knife while wearing an apron that proclaimed “I found my job through the New York Times classifieds.” Two things are weird about this. One, to my knowledge, he had not found his job through the New York Times classifieds. Second, my grandparents didn’t even get the New York Times (through they always read the magazine sections I saved for them). I have no idea where that apron came from.

My grandfather often scorned dessert, but he really did like it. Last year, Eric and I made my grandfather shortbread for his birthday. He was so surprised that we had made him shortbread: how on earth did we know he liked it? To me, it was obvious. There was always a plaid tin of Walker’s Shortbread (purchased at Costco, no doubt) in my grandparents’ house and another one up where we went skiing. Shortbread was everywhere: how could we not have known? Likewise, I remember how much he liked the hamentaschen I made one year before we moved to Japan. He told me they tasted like his mother’s, a compliment I cherish.

My grandfather always took a salad bowl.

The most recent best pictures I have of my grandfather are from our wedding in 2004. Despite that the other men were wearing black tuxedo jackets, my grandfather had a very firm belief that “gentlemen wear white tuxedo jackets to events in the summer”. And so he did. Funny as it was, I didn’t really mind. I was just glad that he decided to travel to Seattle. (the grandfathers)

Despite all these stories, and all the things I knew, there are still legions of things I didn’t think to ask and that, thus, I may never know. I may never know his favorite poet or his Hebrew name or where he went to elementary school or who his childhood friends were and what they did together. I may never know why he didn’t like baseball or where he learned to ski or why he loved the irises in the garden. I worry that I don’t even know what I don’t know.

But I do know that I had the ridiculously good fortune of making it to nearly thirty before losing my grandfather. I feel a little guilty for having been the oldest grandchild and the one that lived the closest for the longest, and thus getting a disproportionate share of my grandparents (if such “shares of grandparents” exist, that is).

I feared that this day would come to pass every time I stepped on a plane to go to Boston or France or Japan or Seattle. That was why I sobbed. I love him. My heart is heavy.

My grandfather leaves behind his wife, four daughters, and five grandchildren.

[As a tribute to both his profession and his engagement with the world, donations can be made in his name to Doctors Without Borders]