“You’re Sisters!”

Our grandfather was a quiet man. A brilliant and quiet man. In his younger years he had dreamed of being a jazz trumpetist. He even graduated from Julliard. For those of you who don’t know, attending (let alone graduating from) Julliard is a big deal if you’re an aspiring musician.

He also played at Carnegie Hall multiple times. That’s a big deal too. In fact, Grandpa liked to flaunt that he had played at Carnegie Hall. It was always when I was getting frustrated playing my violin that it would come up.

He would walk into the den with a grumpy expression  and fold his arms as I struggled through scales. When I was on the verge of giving up he would speak in his gruff, baritone voice (that sounded like a mix of James Earl Jones and Clint Eastwood in one man), “Joanna Lynn Cleland, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?” He always used our middle names when he was trying to be serious.

I would roll my eyes before turning around and replying evenly, “Practice, practice, practice.”

Grandpa then would chuckle and mutter, “Good girl,” before letting me get back to my practicing with a small smile on his lips. I have heard that dumb joke over a million times and I will probably tell it a million times more.

Anyway, with having to support nine children and going to war in his early twenties, Grandpa’s dreams of music fell victim to the suffocating drone of reality. He was a door-to-door salesman for a while and eventually joined the navy. You see, my grandfather thought that he was going to join the navy and play in the navy band. He never dreamed that his ridiculous skill of perfect hearing would land him on a submarine as one of the top sonar guys of his time.

No, joke. My grandfather had such a good ear he learned to recognize the difference between the passing of a humpback whale’s song, a pack of dolphins romping by and the bay of an enemy sub looming in the depths beyond. He could hear everything.

Even in his elder years, he didn’t lose this skill. A pin dropped in the front hall of our two story home, and he heard it no matter where he was in the house. Not just heard it, but was irritated by it. Being great at hearing was a blessing and a curse for our grandfather. He was often stricken with headaches which only added to his grumpy outward demeanor.

For two little girls, this was a tough thing to deal with. Especially as two little girls that were sisters tended to fight. A lot.

I’m not talking the normal arguments of dissention. I’m talking about a war of vocal magnitude so loud that our neighbors a half block away could hear it. While in public I was a quiet child, but when it came to fighting with my sister I could scream with the best of them. Oh, how we yelled. It would be over the dumbest stuff too. Most of the time it was about what TV show we were watching. Our fights also went from grumpy whining to screeching at the tops of our lungs in seconds. There was very little middle ground.

Obviously, for our grandfather this was a nightmare. He was constantly assaulted with the high pitched harpy cries of his two granddaughters.

One day, amidst one of our fights, we heard Grandpa bellow from the front hall, “You two are sisters! You should love each other!”

This only caused us to stop briefly before the screeching began again. To us, fighting was part of how we loved each other. We never really physically hurt each other minus two times. Once Sam nailed me in the back with a massive universal remote (which dropped me melodramatically to the floor) and the other I shoved her into a wall for no reason other than I was mad at Mom and she was there.

After a few moments, while we were screaming at each other, we heard the heavy stomps of Grandpa coming up the stairs.

We lived in an older house that creaked with every step you took. We had learned over the years to be able to recognize who was walking around based on the sound of the creaking footsteps that the house made. Low and behold, Samantha and I had been blessed with our Grandfather’s gift as well. At least when it came to listening to houses creak.

This time it was rather obvious it was Grandpa coming up the stairs. He came barreling into the room after a few more heavy steps, bellowing over our screaming in a deafening roar, “If you two don’t stop this I’m going to take my belt off!”

Both Samantha and I stopped immediately. We’d never been struck as kids by an adult, so the idea that our giant of a grandfather was about to beat the crap out of us with a belt gave us both a sudden abject fear of the future.

It was then from way downstairs in the kitchen all three of us heard Grandma chime in with a warning tone, “If you do that, Tom, you’ll be chasing those girls with your pants around your ankles!”

Turns out Grandma had perfect hearing too. She also had a wonderful way of diffusing situations with random interjections. I’m pretty sure Sam picked up some of her word-weaving skills from Grandma.

Anyway, Grandpa’s face immediately went beet red. He grumbled something beneath his breath before storming off, leaving Sam and I stuck in an awkward place between receding terror and laughter. I can only imagine our Grandfather’s contorted and embarrassed expression as he stormed back down the stairs in the wake of his granddaughters’ giggles.