CLH

My great grandfather, Chester Losie Hancock, had a trick he could do. He could roller skate around on his hands. My grandmother says he was too tall to be a gymnast, a few inches under six feet, but he practiced on the pommel horse every other day at the gym. There is a picture of him in 1923, when he was 31 years old, doing a handstand on the beach. In the picture, it’s easy to see his athleticism. Big quadriceps, narrow waist, calves flexed with toes pointed toward the sky, and a casual expression, lank hair falling down, away from his face and toward the sand. He’s just standing there on his hands, looking like you or I would have if we posed for a picture on the beach, right-ways up. The picture comes along with an obituary clipped from a newspaper in 1938.

Great grandpa Chuck was born in Brooklyn in 1892. He met great grandmother Lulu in California, but I don’t know when or where, maybe down south, near Pismo Beach. He signed up for the army in 1917, and was chief gunner’s mate on the USS St. Louis during the Great War. Sometime after he came home he found a job as a sales representative for the Santa Maria Gas Company, and then my grandma was born in 1921. He died at 46 of some sort of heart problem. My grandma says that it grew too big from fighting off an infection. In the next year or two following Chuck’s death, my grandma met my grandpa, a freshman at UC Berkeley, when he started boarding at the house that Lulu ran.

I’ve never seen a picture of great grandpa Chuck before this one. There is a disconnect between us. I do not grasp what my inheritance is from him. There is something of him in me, of course there must be, but it’s not his physicality. I’m athletic, but a gymnast has a special sort of ability. Looking at it him on the beach there, I can imagine the taught grace with which he did things, the muscular intelligence he must have possessed. I imagine the fluid, shifting balance with which he moved, angling his center of gravity and his posture to maintain poise. Carrying a big plate of food to the dinner table, loading heavy baggage into the trunk of a car, closing a door with his heal, even, or doing whatever it is that a chief gunner’s mate does when his ship is under attack.

If you take the picture and turn it upside down, he looks like a diminutive, airborne Atlas in an old-timey bathing suit, propelling the Earth through space, driving us onward through each day. He’s settled and focused in his work, sure of where we are headed. In 1923, on the beach in Pismo maybe, when his heart was beating strong, and his two-year-old daughter played in the sand nearby, he must have thought, “I have survived a War. I have a job with the gas company. I have produced offspring. And now I’ll do a handstand.”