Grandpa Jim Menaul was born in County Armagh, of a fiercely Presbyterian family with a French name who claimed distant kinship with the Stewarts. He possessed the Irish brogue, along with the charm and ability with a good story. Menaul is an odd, distinctive name, and over the years we have contacted some of the other branches, all of whom retained a family tradition involving French Huegenot refugees and die-hard Presbyterianism and origin in Five-Mile-Town (or Cloghaire). There was the missionary branch who started a school in Albuquerqe, and a fiery senior RAF officer who in the 1950ies seemed to be the British equivalent of General LeMay, but all the efforts of the family geneologists to make all these branches fit together into a coherant structure were stymied by the loss of the Irish church and civic records in the Troubles, some ten years after Grandpa Jim had taken his share of his fathers' estate and legged it for the New World.

Typically, he left before completing his final year as an apprentice gardener, and extravagently spending his patrimony on a second-class passage. He always insisted he crossed over on the Lusitania, to which everyone who knew his reputation as a fabulist, replied, "Umm. Yeah...right, Grandpop." A few months ago, though, I accessed the Ellis Island register of immigrants, and there he was, aged 21 in 1910 and Second Cabin on the RMS Lusitania. With Grandpa Jim you always wanted to get a second source.

The family story goes that by 1917 he was working as a driver for a wealthy man, and had put in an application for American citizenship. It was on the verge of being granted, but in a burst of patriotic fervor, he attempted to join the American Army and was rejected on account of flat feet. Furious, he tore up the paperwork, and stomped off to Canada to join the Canadian Army. After three years of the Western Front, the Canadian Army was rather more indulgent regarding fallen arches, but Grandpa Jim fell ill of pneumonia or maybe the flu, and spent the remainer of WW1 in hospital recovering. He eventually drifted to Southern California and a job as estate gardener and old family retainer. He met and wooed Granny Jessie who was pretty and serious. They were exactly wrong for each other, but stayed married anyway. During the Depression, Grandpa Jim was mildly renown for not just holding a job all during it, but the same job from one end to the other. (Granny Jessie quietly served dinner to the many friends of Mom and Uncle Jimmy who came over to play in the afternoon, and were inexplicably still there at dinnertime.) He never returned to Ireland or Great Britian, but remained to the end of his days a resident alien. Supposedly the first time the Germans bombed London in 1940, his pals at the local had to restrain him from heading downtown to break up the German Consulate in Los Angeles. He held a life-long grudge about the flat feet, which translated to a great deal of worry for Mom who thought it might be an inherited condition. Growing up, JP and Pippy and I all had to wear shoes of the heaviest and most orthopedic nature. When I came back from the Air Force entry physical she was in a twitter:

"Your feet, what about your feet. Did they look at your feet?"
"Yeah, " I said. "They counted them. I have two. I'm in."

JP and I remember him the most clearly, a tubby cheerful little man sitting on the screen porch smoking and listening to a baseball game on a radio with scratchy reception, his once-weekly shave all gone to bristles by Friday evening. Those things: cigarette smoke, a radio baseball game and the sound of an Irish voice, if I close my eyes I can almost hear him. When I open them again, he is gone, the memory as wispy as cigarette smoke on a California summer evening.