The ambition to some day become a writer was planted in my head sometime around 1980 in a Long John Silvers restaurant in Conneaut, Ohio. I was seated at the end of a Formica table, a plastic basket of crispy fried fish and brown hushpuppies in front of me, listening to my grandfather grill my aunt’s boyfriend, Sean.

It was just me, my dad, and my grandfather all looking at Sean, who had an earring and long hair.

He and my aunt were students at Kent State. They listened to punk rock. They were in love, and this lunch of fried seafood was, my aunt now suspects, a set-up to intimidate Sean—punk him out, is how I would put it later, in high school, when my girlfriends’ fathers would get me alone in the kitchen and make small talk with me about college football.

I don’t remember any of the small talk that lead up to it, but at one point I have a distinct memory of my grandfather asking Sean what he planned on doing with his life.

Sean answered, “I want to be a poet.”

My grandfather, a claims agent on the railroad, and my dad, a track supervisor for the same railroad, both laughed.

I didn’t know what was so funny. I felt bad for Sean. “Poet” sounded impressive to me, mainly because I didn’t know any.

As I have blogged previously, my grandfather was a reader. He had a Book of the Month Club subscription, and once took a correspondence course for aspiring novelists. I have in my possession a short story he wrote on a yellow legal pad. My grandmother found it digging through some old papers in their garage. It’s one of my most prized possessions.

He died several years after this scene in the Long John Silvers when I was only twelve, so he didn’t live to see me take an interest in his books. He had most of Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s output, some Faulkner, and a copy of Walden, as well as many more works of popular history on the Civil War.

The only book of poems that I recall seeing in his collection was Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a must-have in any library, but curious considering his attitude toward the pierced and longhaired Sean. After all, the most famous photo of Whitman, the one that confronted readers when they opened Leaves of Grass, caused quite a stir.

Whitman’s friend, William Sloane Kennedy, described the photo as “repulsive, loaferish portrait,” citing Whitman’s “sensual mouth.” Kennedy was so repulsed by it that he hoped that “[it] can be dropped from future editions, or be accompanied by other and better ones that show the mature man, and not merely the defiant young revolter of thirty-seven, with a very large chip on his shoulder, no suspenders to his trousers, and his hat very much on one side.”

However, Whitman liked the photo because he thought it “natural, honest, easy…spontaneous,” though he did worry that he “look[ed] so damned flamboyant—as if I was hurling bolts at somebody—full of mad oaths—saying defiantly, to hell with you!”

Given the contents of my grandfather’s library, given the distinctly Hemingway-esque style of his short story, given the fact that he had a tattoo and served in the Navy, and the fact that in some photographs he bears a striking resemblance to Papa himself, I’ve always thought of my grandfather as a man’s man.

I think this was why he treated Sean the way he did. Sean’s fashion sense was more informed by glam rockers like Adam Ant. In a word, he was effeminate.

In my grandfather’s mind, artists were gods—strong, larger-than-life characters who epitomized manliness. They were cultured and erudite, but also capable of knocking your head off. (I’m told that my grandfather wasn’t one to back down from a fight.)

So I’m interested in this scene in the Long John Silvers because I’m curious how my grandfather would regard me. I’ve just turned thirty-six, and though I’ve never had anything on my body pierced, and I wear my hair cut shorter these days, I identify with Whitman and his photo.

What I mean is that in my book spontaneity, flamboyance, and defiance aren’t bad traits. What I mean is that I don’t like fighting—I’ve never been in a fistfight. I’ve never fired a gun. If there was a war and I was conscripted I would file for conscientious objector status (I already have my CO file ready in a folder in my office, just in case.) Furthermore, I hope that I always have a healthy sense of revolt in me.

God, how I wish I could have known my grandfather. How I wish he had lived longer so that he could have seen me read from my work, so that he could have bought my book, so that he could have put it on his bookshelf and show it off to guests when they came over.

I don’t think we would have seen eye-to-eye on everything, but I know we would at least have agreed on Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” I know this because I’ve read his copy and seen the marginalia he scribbled—a single exclamation point next to the images and lines he admired. There are many of them.

Things didn’t work out between Sean and my aunt, which is for the best. From what my aunt tells me, Sean didn’t end up becoming a poet, which I’d like to think my grandfather foresaw.

I think he knew that he didn’t have the guts to go through with it.