THE DUCK DECOY
“The decoys were front and center when you walked into the house….”
When I was a kid, my family spent many Sundays at my grandparents’ home near Princeton, New Jersey. We'd climb trees out front and run in the sprinkler out back. Inside, there were pictures of family everywhere, and tennis trophies and small bird statues and painted antique duck decoys. The decoys were front and center when you walked into the house and for some reason they fascinated me.
Grandpa died when I was ten. Grandma stayed in the house another decade before moving closer to my parents in the town of Brick. At around the same point, thanks to the 2008 mortgage crisis, I lost my first real job and moved back home. It was not a happy time. I spent my mornings looking for work, but there’s only so much looking for work you can do. I needed surgery on both knees, so I did that, too. Then physical therapy three times a week, and later the gym. I was bored. The days were long. So I started chauffeuring Grandma around: to the supermarket, to the doctor, on weekly lunch dates to the Ocean Queen Diner.
She’d ask about my life (full of uncertainty), my interests (the Yankees, books), my friends (all busy working). I’d ask about her girlhood days in Hoboken. She told me about the time she skipped school to see a local singer named Frank Sinatra, and how she fell for Grandpa, the star player on a traveling basketball team consisting entirely of him and his brothers. She'd talk about Grandpa's time in WWII as a Lieutenant Colonel in North Africa and Europe and how she raised my uncle Ed for more than two years on her own until Grandpa finally came home and got to meet him. I looked forward to our afternoons all week.
Eventually I landed a new job, one that took me away from home and from her. Shortly after, she moved into a retirement center. That’s when I got the duck decoy. It spent the next decade moving with me from apartment to apartment in New York, a reminder of Grandma and all our good times.
In her nineties, she moved to a more affordable retirement home in Florida, close to my aunt and uncle. Then her mind began to slip. I’d call one day and reach the Grandma I knew, sharp and jovial. Another day she'd be slow, confused, mixing up my name with my brother’s. One night she called me, frantic and sobbing: She was lost in the streets of Hoboken and couldn’t find her way home. I knew she was safe in Florida, so I told her it would be okay and handed off the situation to my dad. For months afterward I’d tell my girlfriend, “I should call Grandma,” but I could hardly bring myself to do it. I never did say a proper goodbye.
Grandma died in 2018, at age 100. The duck now sits on a bookshelf in my home office, the girlfriend is my wife, and we have a young son. Grandma never got to meet either of them. But my son is intrigued by the decoy just like I was. Twice I’ve accidentally knocked it off the bookshelf, once nicking its head and the other time decapitating it. (Thank you, wood glue.) Now when my son reaches for it, part of me wants to snatch it away, to keep it safe.
But I don’t think Grandma would begrudge the damage. Or my desire to remember her as she was—a person of wit and beauty, my partner in monotony, my friend. I think she’d just be happy to see her grandson and his boy still appreciating this little wooden keepsake, imperfections and all.
—Kevin Lilley
