Grampa's the reason I'm turning off the radio today

My grandparents lived on Spring Street since the day they got married. They lived there through World War II, when Grampa left for Europe with the Army. He returned to his wife and a toddler son he never met, the jagged memory of a German bayonet sprawled across his chest. He got a job at the High School as a janitor, fathered another son, but he never mentioned the war, not like his bunker buddies down at the Polish Club, not once over sixty years. When he died last year, he left behind a safe deposit box with two important medals of valor under a faded American flag. No one knew he earned them. No one in my family knows why, knows how.

When I think of Spring Street, I don't think of the short road connecting the main drag to the elm-lined state college perimeter. I don't think of the rusty train that coughs and wails at the corner station. I just think of my grandparents and their house, an old New England three-tenement building that stands after years of love and neglect, all rolled into some solitary emotion. Spring Street means overgrown lilacs and stacks of molding egg cartons filled with the golf balls Grampa found on the college campus. Spring Street means Gramma rolling dough for pizza and Grampa diving for simple treasure in the dumpsters behind the strip mall adjoining his property. Spring Street means radio.

Grampa taught me how to live in the moment. He was never bored. He always had something to do, even if the something was sitting in his parlor reading a Louis LAmour mystery book for hours or listening to endless Red Sox games on a radio turned up way too high. That radio meant life and death to Grampa. He told me stories of life in the foxholes, life with a bayonet in one hand, a radio beside him, a radio that echoed the machinery of war.

Grampa taught me to waltz every Sunday night when the radio played songs from old Poland. The music crackled, sounded sweet and sure, as if God split the heavens with a lightning bolt and gave us a secret listen to His world. Every Tuesday night mean a ballgame, Wednesdays were cowboy songs, Thursdays were big bands, the rat pack. My Grampa's life revolved around radio. He took communion Saturday nights at St. Francis and kept walking, kept walking, wafer on tongue, out the door, straight home so he wouldn't miss comedy hour.

I captured my Grampa's love of radio - taught my boys to seek out good music, good shows with a twist of the dial. When the internet opened the door to podcasting, I started my own crazy show, filled with music and good stories. Every day I click over to my favorite internet stations and listen to bluegrass, alternative folk, the music that Top 40 doesn't allow, that commercial interest doesn't love.

Two summers ago I drove my three sons 8,500 miles in one month, visiting all of our relatives along the way, our most important destination being Grampa's house on Spring Street. The entire trip I told my sons how much fun I had with Grampa when I was a young girl. They didn't believe me. They didn't think an old man with a crooked nose and dirty fingernails who could barely hear them on the telephone could be very much fun. They didn't remember the way Grampa swung them higher than the sky, the nights laying on his couch listening to the radio. When we reached his house, the first thing I did was notice the silence.

"Grampa! Why don't you have the radio on?"

He glared at the machine, as if it were a spurned lover.

"Birdie, they don't play my music anymore. Just listen. Turn it on and listen."

I switched the dial, clicked from one station to the next, as the old-fashioned brown box spit out rap, out top-40, out once commercial after another. The era had passed.

I pointed to the computer on Grampa's desk, the one my parents bought him, the one he refused to use. I made him sit next to me, boys to the left and right of us, wile I showed him how to listen to internet radio, to REAL radio, once more. I bookmarked stations devoted to old-timey music, to Polish polka, to his beloved Red Sox.

When we drove out of the driveway, our windows rolled down, we all yelled "Bye, Grampa!"

But Grampa shook his head and corrected us.

"Never say Goodbye. Just say See You Later."

He hustled inside, didn't wait to wave goodbye. Just like Saturday night church, everything was second to the radio.

Grampa lived on his own, in his same Spring Street home, until six weeks before his death. I thought he would live forever. He passed before my sons could see him one more time. I flew to see him, at a time close to his death, when he lay in a hospital bed, his arms bruised from too many needle pricks, too many attempts to make an old heart work. I scratched off a lottery ticket I bought for him at a convenience store, and we laughed when he won three dollars. I knew it was the last time I would see him alive. I wanted to stay at his side, wanted to hold his hand forever, until Gramma caught it again up in heaven. I didn't want to say goodbye. So I said the only thing I could.

"See you later, Grampa. I bet you hear awesome radio in heaven."

Today is an Internet Radio Day of Silence. The same way that big corporations stole the small town stations that played Grampa's music, big music companies are trying to steal the music once again.

Please turn off your internet radio today in solidarity. Don't let the music stop forever, don't let it morph commercial, forgotten.

Birdie Jaworski is on the BlogHer '07 Art of Storytelling panel. She blogs at La Pajaro.