08 May 2025

Charisma

fiction by Sam Thielman

Photo: Jeffrey Gammon via Wikipedia

The summer after I turned twelve my granddad shot a dove with a BB gun and called me in a panic.

He, that is my grandfather, was a really charismatic old guy. People always think of charisma as a sort of superpower but in my experience there’s not really a superhero option. The thing that happens with most charismatic people is they either become controlling monsters or they just live weird eccentric lives exactly the way they want, and he was one of the latter, mostly. He could tell you which stack had which book in it but he could never seem to get all the books onto the shelves, of which there were too few. He was a preacher, not exactly a fire-and-brimstone guy but certainly in that tradition when he got behind the pulpit. But the way he talked to people was generally a lot kinder to them than you’d expect, especially if you were a drug addict or had been in prison or were homeless. He was sentimental about little kids and old ladies and poor people and he had cheap plaster busts and statues of his hero Abraham Lincoln all over the house. That may not seem like a big deal to you but it was not an admiration widely shared in that part of the country at that time.

I have no idea why he had a BB gun. He usually had a real gun within reach. He had horrible health problems most of his adult life, some of them stemming from getting dependent on painkillers, and some of them just the natural wear and tear on your heart you get if nobody ever says no to you and your culinary predilections run to canned tamales and McDonald’s. He was a big guy, well over six feet, I think—but he died when I was a teenager, so most of my memories of him are of generalized hugeness—and he loved to hunt and fish and so on. He had had a horrible fatherless childhood during the Great Depression that he liked to dwell on.

He took me fishing a few times with his buddy Peter, which I loved, and he would have taken me hunting but I always liked animals and he knew it, so he never pressed that particular issue. Once when he was mad I hadn’t watered his tulips he described them to me as “like a little chick dying in the heat.” I think he understood afterward that he’d upset me by saying that, and maybe that was why he called me when he shot the dove.