Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

Of all the revisions I've made recently, I  think this will be the most challenging. I suppose I saved it for last for this reason alone. 

This is my grandfather. He died earlier this year, and he is the only person to date that I've been reasonably close to and have lost in  this manner. It's given me pause to reflect on life and how precious the loved ones we have really are. Angie and I visited Grandpa a few times in the nursing home where he spent his last days, his body slowly succumbing to the ravages of a lifetime of cigarette-smoking. It makes me smile in the midst of all the sadness to think how much he liked my wife, only having known her for a few years. Growing up in rural Louisiana, albeit in vastly different time periods, they had a lot in common. And though I could never talk with him about fishing or pianos, he was still so proud of me and the things I accomplished in  my life. With the appreciation of a grandparent, a feeling I don't know that I'll truly be able to relate to until and unless we have a child of our own someday, he treasured the little things and the not-so-little things.

This is one of many letters to the editor that I've written to our local paper, The Advocate, over the years. Mom used to clip many of these and send them to Grandpa.

I should probably feel more embarrassed about this than I do, but the above is one of the reasons I'm not one of the great artists of the 21st century. Grandpa kept this drawing of a scene from The Empire Strikes Back for many years, obviously not for its inherent quality, but because it meant a lot to him.

And there's more. He kept one of the few originally-signed unbound copies of my master's thesis. The research itself was meaningless to him, but the achievement was not. As a reminder--or maybe just because he never thought to get rid of them--he kept two old plastic buckets of Lego toys that I would play with when we visited him at the shop in Ponchatoula.

Even with his modest income, he thought to help us out in a time of financial difficulty. I have two beautiful bookcases and an exquisite stained quilt rack that showcase one of the things that he loved best: working with his hands. He was generous and stubborn, quiet and proud and loving.

This will be our first Christmas without him, and I think about that often. I know it's hard on Mom. But I know she was right when she said to me that the words on the page of the newspaper are not his life and his legacy--the pictures that we carry in our hearts and our minds are. And there are worse forms of immortality than that.