My grandfather, Dwight Archibald Garner, known to everyone as Archie, spent most of his early life working in the coal mines in and around Marion County, West Virginia. He quickly rose to become a foreman. Later he branched out and in his spare time became a successful realtor. Archie had a big, bustling personality—he confronted each day as if it were a barn in need of raising. He was happier than most people. Maybe the fact that his own father had died young, in a car crash, gave him a sense that life is fleeting. He made the most of the best things in life and the least of the worst.

Evelyn Waugh once wrote, “Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.” Archie was a dynamo. He wasn’t a sermonizer, but to be around him was to learn how to live. You picked up things. Some of the lessons he imparted were large and metaphysical, others minuscule and mundane. But I’m surprised at how many have stuck with me, and how relevant to my life they remain. Here are a few.



Get to it: My grandfather worked early shifts at the mines. Later in life, he simply got up before anyone else. By the time another human was down for coffee, he’d been to town for breakfast and gossip, shoveled the walk, and worked two hours in his office. If he wanted to sit on the porch for a while in the afternoons, he’d earned it.

Keep a poem memorized: If you pestered him long enough, my grandfather would stand up at family gatherings and recite “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” a long ballad by the British-Canadian poet Robert Service. It’s about a bad hombre, a rowdy bar filled with ragtime piano, gunshots, and Dan’s “light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.” Myself, I’ve got only a few Philip Larkin poems in my head, as well as a bit of both Auden’s “Refugee Blues” and Tony Hoagland’s “When Dean Young Talks About Wine.” I hear Archie’s voice urging me to get better about this.

Family first: When my father missed a tackle during a high school football game, a wiseguy down front made a loud crack about “that Garner kid.” Archie leapt down five rows of bleachers, got in the man’s face, and critiqued his punditry in a series of short, simple sentences.

By the time another human was down for coffee, he’d been to town for breakfast and gossip, shoveled the walk, and worked two hours in his office.

Kill what you eat; eat what you kill: Until he was in his eighties, Archie killed a deer each year with a rifle or a bow and arrow. He stocked his freezer with the meat and ate it all year long. Once, he was on the fishing pier in Naples, Florida, where my family moved when I was young. A guy hooked a tremendous fish, and Archie helped him reel it in. It was a sawfish, a seemingly prehistoric beast—something yanked up from a Jules Verne novel. Archie got a hacksaw and helped cut it up into steaks. He proudly lugged home a slice as wide and as thick as a car tire, and we ate it for weeks. It tasted terrible, like elephant meat poached in saliva.

Take care of your digestion: Archie was a devotee of Horace Fletcher (1849–1919), a health-food maniac known as “the great masticator.” Fletcher believed, as did Archie, that you should chew each bite of food thirty-two times. Archie liked to torture his grandchildren with this dictum. I no longer fletcherize my food; it makes a lamb shank taste like bean paste. But Archie understood, long before Gwyneth Paltrow, that when your guts are happy, the rest of you stands a decent chance of being happy, too.

Keep the game on: All summer in his roomy house in Mannington, West Virginia, a Pittsburgh Pirates game was on Archie’s transistor radio. He kept it turned down low, so it simmered in the background, like a pot of beans. My childhood was a good time to be a Pirates fan. Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell were my heroes, and their exploits filled my mind as accounts of them percolated through the afternoon air.

It never hurts to be in shape: Archie was a self-educated man who looked good in a bow tie, but he was a rough cob, too. He’d grown up in a place and time when you couldn’t always count on the law to settle your disputes. Archie was good at wrestling; he pronounced it “wrastling.” He kept trim, and you could tell he could take care of himself. When he died, we found a pair of brass knuckles in his desk. I can’t imagine him using them, but maybe he felt good knowing they were there.

Thriftiness counts: Archie came of age during the Great Depression, a time of want, and he couldn’t bear waste. He never threw away anything he might need again. Paper towels? What a way to squander money. When he needed to blow his nose, Archie went to the bathroom, ran the taps, and with an odd sort of formality emptied one nostril, then the other, into the sink.

Use everything: He didn’t have a mystical bent, but Archie sometimes carried with him medicinal roots and leaves he’d foraged in the woods. These included ginseng root, chicory leaves, and wood sorrel. If someone had, say, a toothache, he’d pull a chunk of root out of his pocket and say, “Here, chew on this for a while.” The other person, baffled, would give it a shot. This always made me smile.

Look for your opening: When he was in his sixties, Archie, an American go-getter, began to attend county land auctions and buy mineral rights to remote properties for pennies on the dollar. None of these rights paid off massively for him, but they were smart investments and are still in the family. I have complicated, to say the least, feelings about the mining going on in West Virginia. But I will say this: It’s as if Archie tucked a lottery ticket into his descendants’ pockets.

When he died, we found a pair of brass knuckles in his desk. I can’t imagine him using them, but maybe he felt good knowing they were there.

Know when to splurge: All his life Archie scrapped, scrimped, and saved. All his life he also dreamed of owning a Cadillac. When he was in his sixties, having put his children through college and finally feeling financially comfortable, he bought one—a big brown monster 1973 Cadillac Eldorado. It was the size of a parade float. He drove local beauty queens in parades in the other car he bought, a 1965 Mustang convertible. They perched on the backseat and waved. When I want to know what happiness looks like, I sometimes watch the video of Ronnie Hawkins sitting in with the Band in The Last Waltz, singing “Who Do You Love?” That man is happy. Or I think about Archie driving his Eldorado.

How to get a perfect night’s sleep: In his kitchen late at night during the summer, just before bed, Archie liked to slice a ripe peach into a bowl, then pour a bit of milk on top. It was his form of a nightcap. This remains one of my favorite things, and now it’s one of my children’s, too. Like Archie himself, it’s straightforward, uncomplicated, and never lets you down.

This article appears in the April '18 issue of Esquire.

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Dwight Garner Dwight Garner is a journalist and book critic for The New York Times.

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