Unknown

The Day before

It was the middle of the day, I made myself egg rolls for lunch and just finished eating them at my desk. My design was not close to being finished and it looks like patches of clothing randomly placed on a, mostly, naked mannequin. I licked my fingers, looking at my mannequin in disgust and annoyance, closed my lunch box and got up to throw away trash.

My phone starts to buzz in my pocket as I make my way to the edge of the room, I throw my stuff in the trash and take my phone out my pocket, the Caller ID has made all the energy that I had left in my body completely disappear into thin air. I let the phone ring and thought to myself.

Is it worth it?

I roll my eyes and slide the green button over. "Yes?" I greet the other line. 

"Hello! yeah, hello should be the first thing you should say to your mother, don't be disrecptpful. Hello Jason, I haven't heard from you in a while, still wasting your time up there? Too busy to talk to your family?" I sigh, this has got to be the worst thing that has happened today. "Yes, I'm doing fine and yourself?" I reply.

"Yeah, well I would be doing better if I'd heard from my son, instead of seeing him on social media being a superstar." I could do without the gas lighting but I'm, sad to say, use to it.

 "That's great mom, is there anything else you wish to talk about?" I answer. 

Alice does this on occasion, calls me and complains about how I should have been a police officer like my dad or a lawyer like my little sister. I avoid her calls mostly to keep my sanity, she's the reason I can barely hold a conversation, Alice makes me hate communicating with all of human-kind.

"Yeah actually if you would have answered my calls there was something I needed to tell you, your Fathers Father pasted away last month and we had his funeral last Wednesday, you remember him right? Of course you were too busy to answer the phone or your text messages to know or notice ..."

What was she saying? I. . . well I don't know.

. . . I couldn't hear her anymore.

I couldn't think. . . 

I couldn't even breathe. . . I started to space out completely.

My Fathers Father, Jason Johnson, I had his name so technically I'm Jason Johnson the II. He was my grandaddy, an old man that wore simple clothes and did simple things. 

In his late 20's he was a drunk, an alcoholic that didn't see a future for himself. He told me that my grandma was the only friend he had left after graduating college, she told him to get sober or "get the F*ck out of my face!" He loved her, so he never picked up a drink again. He told me he used drinking as a way to escape the life he had as a child, so he picked up the piano and had a family instead. Made his living by working for the community. 

He was a local hero as an adult, a firefighter with a kind heart and a love for music. He Saved some cats here and there, but mostly saved families trapped in house fires and car accidents. 

He later saved his money from his retirement and bought a large acre farm for him and his family, started gardening to pass the time, sold fruit because he grew too many. He sold them at a cheap price, to people that could barely afford normal grocery store prices, he didn't need the money anyways. But in his spare time he would play the piano at the local bars around town with his jazz band.

As a kid I would sneak in thru the back, then sit on the side of the stage trying to listen to him and his band play all my favorite songs, I would then try to imitate them. I moved my hands to the sound of the piano closing my eyes and nodding my head, then the bass, feeling the deep acoustics and lastly the saxophone blowing air out my mouth and making dramatic movements like the player, like a child normally does when imitating.