was blend in, and since starting school, I’d somehow done everything possible to make myself stick out. Now I was going to show up to Dad Night with an impostor, drawing even more puzzled looks. I wished that I’d just stayed home after all, and tried to think of ways to cancel our outing at the last minute as I waited in the living room for Grandpa to get ready.
Finally, he came out of the bedroom, adjusting his favorite bolo tie around his neck, the one with a nugget of turquoise mounted on a shiny silver square. He wore it only to square dances, funerals and weddings. I noticed that his jeans were creased down the front—he must have taken an unworn Christmas pair out of the cedar chest. His mustard-colored Western shirt had ivory snaps and thin gold metallic stripes. His hair was combed down, his stubble was gone and he smelled of aftershave. I checked his fingernails: clean.
We walked down the street to my elementary school. In one hand he held mine, and in the other he held a jar of honey for my teacher.
Inside the classroom, I guided Grandpa to the table of art projects and pointed out my bee. It was about the size of a loaf of bread, and I’d put effort into shaping it correctly, with six legs and four wings. I had unfolded two paper clips and poked them into the hardened newspaper for antennae. Grandpa picked the bee up and turned it to look at it from all sides, whistling appreciatively. Just then my teacher walked over and introduced herself, and he gently placed it back down.
“Quite a bee,” she said.
Grandpa said he was happy to meet her, and held out the honey jar. She placed a hand over her heart as she reached for the gift.
“This is from your bees?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Grandpa said.
“Incredible,” she whispered.
I’d never heard Grandpa say ma’am before, and I giggled. He threw me a look that said not to blow his cover. He was on his best behavior, and so far, so good. No one had asked him who he was or why he was with me. We were a pair, and that’s all that mattered. We stood close together while the other fathers talked to the class about their careers, and as I listened to stories about working in banks and courtrooms and on golf courses, I wondered what Grandpa was going to say. He didn’t have a real job—one with a workplace and a boss and a paycheck. He just fixed things and kept bees. I worried he wouldn’t have much to offer, or he might get flustered having to speak before a group. He once told me the great thing about being a beekeeper is that you can do it all alone, without having to speak to anyone. Grandpa was the kind of person who preferred to keep to himself, and he always used the minimal amount of words to convey a thought. I wasn’t sure he was up to this.
The teacher called his name, and I let go of his leg. He walked to the front of his class and cleared his throat.
“I’m Frank, and I’m here with my granddaughter, Meredith,” he said. “My family goes back four generations on the Big Sur coast.”
I heard an interested murmur from the group.
Grandpa said his great-grandfather was one of Big Sur’s earliest pioneers, William Post, who was eighteen when he left Connecticut in 1848 to become a whaler, finding work burning blubber into lamp oil and harvesting whale bones for corsets at the Monterey Whaling Station. Two years later, he married a local Native American woman from the Ohlone tribe named Anselma Onesimo inside the Carmel Mission. They built one of the first homesteads in Big Sur, the 640-acre Post Ranch, where they raised cattle and hogs and planted an apple orchard. They led cattle drives to Monterey, and packing trips to take hunters and fishermen into the Big Sur backcountry. And they had beehives.
Grandpa explained that he began keeping bees as a teenager, after a swarm landed in his yard and his father showed him how to capture it and put it in a hive. The bees quickly multiplied, outgrew their hive and started developing new queens—a sign the crowded colony was getting ready to divide itself by swarming. So his father showed him how to move the incubating queens and some of the bees into an empty hive to make a second colony.