The first chakra, called the root chakra, regulates the energy surrounding our very existence.  It’s the feelings we have about belonging, our right to be here, and issues of survival.  And it’s related to, well, our relatives – family and generational patterns that have existed for years are held in the root chakra. 

For as long as I can remember, my grandmother was the life of the party, and Granddad was the straight man.  She was fun and games, while he was steady and dependable, the grounding force in our family.  She could talk to anyone about anything, and he was sometimes known to just grunt in response to a question.  But in the years since Grandmom’s death, I’ve gotten to know my grandfather better.  And that has changed me.

It was in 2004, I think, that Granddad first asked me to lunch.  He called and said, “I want to see you.  I know you’re busy, but if you’ll have lunch with me on Fridays, I’ll buy your lunch.”  We’ve been meeting in the same little diner at noon on Fridays since.  He’s still not much of a talker, but that doesn’t bother me.  What matters is that after all these years I now understand that my respect for him comes from who he is but my love for him is rooted in how he sees me.

Our Friday lunches have been a grounding force in my life because, intended or not, they have been about who I am and where I come from.

And they’re about tomatoes, too.

I was still married when our lunch dates began, but the marriage was withering like a tomato vine at the end of a long, hot, dry summer.  In those first few months after we started meeting, I often caught myself comparing my husband to the man who sat before me.  They were so very different, and my husband was left wanting on almost every level.  Why, I wondered, hadn’t I attached myself to someone more like Horace Adams, my dad’s dad, the best man I’ve ever known. 

Granddad was born January 23, 1923, in the tiny town of Rome, Georgia.    As a young man, he was a fiery redhead with the proverbial temper to match the hair.  Now, at eighty-nine, he has the same amount of hair that he had fifty years ago, only it’s as white as the porcelain veneers replacing his top front teeth.   And his temper must have vanished along with the hair color, because in all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never once seen it. 

One Friday, as I slid into the booth for lunch I noticed he was missing a lower front tooth.

“What happened to your tooth?” I asked, horrified.  The week before, the tooth had been there.

“Aww, that tooth was bothering me, so I took a pair of pliers and yanked it out,” he shrugged.

I imagined dentists everywhere cringing and a Tooth Fairy impressed enough to waive the age limit and contemplate payment for that lost tooth.  But it begs the question of why on earth an eighty-nine-year-old man would pull his own tooth.

We waited for a few minutes for my uncle and cousin to show up, then ordered our food.  When they sat down, my cousin started to apologize for being late, but he stopped in mid-sentence and said, “Whoa, Granddad, you’re missing a tooth!  What happened?”

Before Granddad could answer, my uncle interrupted, “He played dentist on himself with a pair of pliers.”   Then, shaking his head, he continued, “Dad, they give you pain medication, you know?  This is the 21^st century, and you’re almost ninety.  You don’t have to do everything yourself.”

“Why didn’t you just go to the dentist?”  my cousin asked.

Granddad was slowly chewing a bite of his Chick-Fil-A sandwich.  He looked at my cousin, finished chewing, swallowed, shrugged, and said, “I didn’t want to.” 

Granddad has never uttered a superfluous word in his life.  And getting him to explain himself?  Won’t happen.  But the man is nothing if not honest.   He always says what he means.  So if he says he didn’t go to the dentist because he didn’t want to, that’s the simple truth.

But why didn’t he want to? 

One could argue that money was the issue.  A child of the Depression, Granddad remembers barely having enough food, much less money to pay a dentist.  My cousin asked him during another of our Friday lunches what his family did for food during the Depression.  Granddad stared at him for a minute, then said matter-of-factly, “Well, my dad gave me his gun and two shells and said, ‘Don’t come back until you’ve killed something.’”  For a family struggling just to have enough food to survive, toothaches were cured with a swig of homemade corn whiskey and a pair of pliers.

He and my grandmother married during World War Two, and they had two sons.  After the war, he tried farming, but the farm failed.  Paying a dentist would have been low on the list of priorities at that time, probably akin to paying $4 for a cup of coffee at Starbucks these days.  Unable to make the monthly payment on the farm they were renting, he was forced to look for work in Atlanta, a half-day’s drive away.

He found work at Ft. Gillem, and they moved to the south side of Atlanta with their two young sons.  A few years later, he opened a vending machine business on the side.  The business prospered, and they lived happily and comfortably, enjoying their children and grandchildren.  They even caught up on the dental care they’d neglected in their younger years.   Grandmom had extensive work done to save teeth damaged by childhood malnutrition.  And Grandad replaced several top teeth with those beautiful veneers.

In their retirement, they were able to purchase a second home, a lake house in North Georgia, in the same valley where they had grown up.  They were married fifty-nine years, three months, and one week, and then my grandmother died of pancreatic cancer.

In the winter of 2009, our Friday lunch conversation turned to how much he’d lost in the 2008 stock market crash.

“Nearly eleven thousand dollars,” he lamented, adding that the stock market would eventually come back but that he probably wouldn’t be around long enough to see his investment account completely rebound.  Then he said, “I paid that much for a set of teeth one time, so I reckon it’s all relative.”

It wasn’t the money, then.  He had enough money, certainly, to pay a dentist to pull that one bad tooth. 

And it’s not like he didn’t have access to a dentist.  Our family dentist is also a close friend who on occasion makes house calls.  My little niece Kate fell and nearly knocked out a front tooth when she was two.  Her mother, my sister, called Dr. Al, who immediately jumped on his jet ski and came across the lake to look at her tooth.  Early the next morning, he did an emergency root canal on a two year old to save a baby tooth that will eventually fall out on its own.  Why?  “Because the baby needs to be beautiful,” he crooned in his sexy Cuban voice. 

He would have done exactly the same thing for Grandad.  So it wasn’t the lack of money or lack of access to dental care that prompted him to pull his own tooth.   I wondered if perhaps the pain of his toothache had been so intense Grandad couldn’t wait to see the doctor.

I don’t think so.  Historically, our family members have possessed an extremely high pain threshold.  And we all know it came from Grandad.  He once told me that he came home from World War Two hooked on the cigarettes freely given to the G.I.s.  “One day I was driving in my truck, and I looked at my cigarette and thought it’s a nasty habit and an expensive one, and I don’t want to do this any more.”  He looked at me and said, “I don’t understand what people mean when they say they’re addicted.  That’s the last cigarette I ever smoked.”   In other words, the man can tolerate a toothache.

So what would possess the man to pull a tooth with a pair of pliers?

My uncle would say it’s because Granddad is stubborn.  I once watched the two of them argue over whether or not Granddad should climb up on his own roof to install a satellite dish.  The argument was getting a little heated, and I tried to diffuse it by saying, “Granddad, if you do, someone might think you’re Santa Claus.”  He chuckled, but stubbornly refused to promise us that he wouldn’t climb up on his roof. 

His reason?  Because he could do it himself.

Last summer, Granddad had cataract surgery on his good eye.  I went to spend a few days with him, mostly so that I could drive him around and be his eyes until his vision was completely restored.  The first morning, I woke to find him in the kitchen cooking me breakfast.  And then I saw that the dryer was pulled away from the laundry room wall.  “What are you doing with the dryer, Granddad?”

“Awww, the cotton-pickin’ thing ain’t workin’ this morning.  I pulled it out to see if I can fix it.”

I didn’t dare mention calling a repairman.  Because even with compromised vision, he’s still the best appliance repairman I’ve ever known.  If he can’t fix it, no one can.  He has a shop in his basement, a twenty-by-fifteen foot room containing a larger tool inventory than the local Ace Hardware.  At any given time, he has a broken dishwasher or clothes dryer, probably one he found abandoned on the side of the road, that just needs a few minor adjustments to make it as good as new.  His grandchildren have never wanted for a major household appliance; we just had to ask Granddad if he had an old one lying around that he could fix.  He mows his lawn with a Snapper he’s had since the sixties.   It’s older than I am.

            While we ate breakfast, I stared at the hole between his front lower teeth and realized that before me sat a man who had, as a child, wondered if he would go to bed hungry.  He had marched into liberated concentration camps at the end of the Second World War and been assigned the gruesome task of helping bury the stacks of bodies.

 In his lifetime, he has experienced pain in many different forms.  Seven years before, he had helplessly watched as the love of his life suffered with pancreatic cancer. He still wears his wedding band, and to this day, his eyes fill with tears at the mention of her name.

The romanticized reason for his decision to act as his own dentist would be to say that compared to the pain of losing Grandmom, pulling his own tooth was nothing.  Or, like he said, it’s all relative. 

Then again, the reason could be as simple as he just wanted to.

Well-tended tomatoes, like few other plants, are able to out-produce the needs of the grower.  At some of our Friday lunches, it’s just Granddad and me.  But every once in a while, all the grandchildren and even the great-grandchildren show up.  And I know, because he said it once or twice before, that on those days Granddad is thinking about Grandmom and marveling at the bounty from their well-tended marriage.

I mentioned earlier that tomatoes are part of our lunchtime narrative. Every Friday of every summer since we started having lunch together, Granddad has brought me a grocery sack full of orange-red homegrown tomatoes.  On some summer Fridays, my uncle, Gerry, shows up, and he asks our waitress for a sharp knife as soon as he’s seated.  He then digs through my bag of tomatoes, grabs the nicest one, and slices it.

Occasionally, a server will good-naturedly say, “Sir, we have food here.  You don’t have to bring your own.”  But mostly no one says anything.  Gerry gets away with it because they all love and respect Granddad.

After the sliced tomato has been salted, peppered, and passed around, we each eat our portion in silent reverence.  And then my uncle invariably says, “Dad, why can’t I get tomatoes to grow as good as you?”

Granddad just grins and says, “I don’t know.  I don’t do nothing special.”

Every Spring, after the possibility of frost has passed, Granddad sets out four or five tomato plants.  Big Boys are a good producer, and he’s had good luck with Better Boys, but he usually just buys what the local nursery stocks.

He doesn’t grow anything but tomatoes.  He’s got room for cucumbers, squash, onions, and even butterbeans.  But he only grows tomatoes in that back corner of his yard, the lowest point, where all the runoff from several yards flows.  It’s where he’s dumped grass clippings ever since he and Grandmom bought that house in 1984 or 85.  The soil is rich and moist and perfect for growing tomatoes.

I’ve tried my hand at gardening over the years, too.  But I never had a spot like Granddad’s, mostly because my yard was too shady.  What I could manage to grow always got stolen by the deer, so I eventually gave up.  It made me even more grateful for Granddad’s tomatoes.

There’s an email that’s gone viral, one I get every few months, touting the benefits of certain foods that look like the parts of the human body that they benefit the most.  For example, walnuts are good for the brain, and a walnut, when cracked open, resembles a brain.  And the tomato looks like a human heart.  The email says, “A tomato is red and usually has four chambers, just like our heart.  Tomatoes are also a great source of lycopene, a plant chemical that reduces the risk of heart disease.”  It goes on to say that women with the highest blood levels of lycopene have thirty percent less heart disease than those with low lycopene levels.  Even though I think the email is a little on the hokey side, I can’t deny that Granddad’s tomatoes are very good for my heart.

Then again, Granddad himself is good for my heart.  When I was eight or nine years old, my grandparents picked me up from school one day.  They took me to dinner, and then they took me shopping.  They wanted to buy me a pretty new dress for my upcoming piano recital.  I’ll never forget sitting in the backseat of their powder blue Ford sedan and saying, “I don’t really want a new dress.  What I want is a softball glove.”

I saw them exchange glances.  Grandmom was trying very hard not to laugh.  Granddad didn’t say a word, but when we walked into the department store, our first stop was sporting goods.  We found a nice Spalding glove that fit my left hand perfectly.  Then we went to find a dress for my piano recital.

It probably bothered them that I wanted a softball glove rather than a new dress.  But the message they sent to me that day was that they loved me and weren’t interested in forcing me to fit their mold.  I deserved to be who I was, and they loved the softball-playing granddaughter just as much as the piano-playing one.

Two summers ago, I moved away.  Even though my divorce had been final for quite a while, my ex and I were still at odds.  I needed a change, so I moved from Atlanta to St. Augustine Beach. 

Telling Granddad was hard.  He simply said, “Well, I wish you weren’t, but I understand why.”  I noticed that his lip quivered when he said it.

Every six or eight weeks, I drive to Atlanta to visit with family and friends.  I often schedule sessions with my therapist and trainer, sometimes see doctors I haven’t yet replaced.  I always have lunch with Granddad.

 During my last trip, I saw my OBGYN, who chided me for not having a mammogram in the past eighteen months.  Two summers ago, right in the middle of my move, a mammogram signaled a suspicious spot in my right breast.  Five more mammograms and a biopsy later, I was given the all clear.  But I’d had so much radiation that I could screw a light bulb into my ear and light it up like Uncle Fester.  So last month, I opted instead for breast thermography.  Unfortunately, it indicated some spots that will need to be watched.

I also saw my trainer.  As we were catching up on the past four months, the longest I’ve gone without seeing him, Andrew asked how I’m feeling.  The truth is that I feel wonderful, and I’m happier than I’ve ever been, but I mentioned the breast thermography and the troublesome report I’d received.

Andrew said, “I want you to think about something.  The heart is the closest organ to your breasts.  Maybe by presenting as a problem in your heart chakra, your body is trying to tell you to open your heart.  Do you have trouble giving or receiving love?  And how much do you love yourself?”

I didn’t know much about chakras or energetic healing, but I knew this:  the very first time I had a suspicious mammogram was the same year I filed for divorce.  My husband had just left me for a much younger woman, and I had vowed to never, ever be that vulnerable to heartbreak again. 

After my session with the trainer, I Googled “chakras.”

The root chakra, I read, is the grounding force in our lives.  The emotion attached to it is the feeling that I deserve to exist, that I have a place in this world.  Imbalance in the root chakra leaves one feeling rootless, groundless, and out of place.  And the color associated with this chakra?  Red.  Like one of Granddad’s tomatoes.

That same day, a Friday, I had lunch with Granddad.  He handed me a huge grocery sack full of his homegrown tomatoes.  He’d gotten tickled during the meal as I recounted my attempts to grow my own tomatoes this year, how I spent a good deal of money hiring someone to plow me up a 5x5 foot patch, work in some organic fertilizer, and divert my sprinkler system because the salty water in my well is no good for tomatoes.  How I ordered heirloom seeds and cheered when they poked their little heads through the soil.  And he actually giggled when I produced a gift for him:   one of my tomatoes, a perfect red orb the size of a large gumball. 

Granddad’s tomatoes are giants compared to mine.  He’s so good at growing tomatoes, in fact, that this year, rather than growing his own, my uncle simply bought two tiny plants, took them to Granddad, and said, “These are mine.  Please plant them in your yard and grow them for me.”

My mom tells me that after I was born, Granddad used to call her when he got off work in the afternoon and ask if he could come see me.  “She’s sleeping,” Mom would often tell him.  But she says that didn’t matter.  Granddad would simply come sit next to my crib and watch me sleep. 

That story tells me all I need to know about how much I am loved and adored.  How I belong.  All I needed to do is see myself through Granddad’s eyes.  Now, as I contemplate opening my heart so that I can give and receive love, I picture myself handing Granddad the seeds of my self-love and saying, “I know they’re ultimately my responsibility, but please plant them in your yard and grow them for me.”

It’s going to be a bumper crop.