You Should Have Known Your Grandfather

Yesterday, Sam and I rode together to a more distant grocery store, in search of more tomatillos than we could expect to find on the shelves of the Brookside Market. We listened to my music way too loud, and I observed that his inability to appreciate arena rock (Def Leppard, "Photograph") mirrored my own inability to appreciate my father's Glen Miller.

Probably it was just the lingering sentimentality of listening to Slaid Cleaves, but the thought struck me. It's been 17 years since he died and a quarter century since he had the stroke that stole his words and took my real father away. I still miss him painfully, though less frequently as the years pass.

Yesterday, though, I felt the stab that my children never really knew him. The stroke had rendered him awkwardly speechless before they were born, and their memories of him are strained and almost nonexistent. Ali remembers him playfully trying to take her teddy bear, and being kind of frightened. She would have been 3.

I have a photo of Dad holding Sam as a baby. Sam is stretching to get off his lap and on to some adventure, and Dad is holding him with his one good arm and smiling warmly.

I see my marks on my children. They are random and essential. Some of them I'm happy to pass on, and others are quirks a more generous geneticist than God would have opted not to extend.

The best stuff, though, comes from my father to them. I see Dad's Irish sense of humor in them both. In Sam I see his love of words and language. In Ali, I see his ability to understand people at a deeper level - to look through the behavior of the moment and ponder what makes people tick. In both of them, I see a work ethic and acceptance that the world was not designed to make things easy for them, though it has plenty of joy if they accept it. They both received his slow temper.

My father knew me. He could spend hours discussing pacifism with me, or baseball, or work. He knew my siblings, too, and treated us all individually. I never felt like I had to conform to his interests - he was willing to adapt to my own. His pride in our achievements was sunshine, and his patience with our shortcomings was tolerance, but never acceptance.

Time did not allow my children to know my father. They would have loved him, and he would have loved them. Stuck between their generations, I see how both would have grown and thrived in that absent opportunity, and I realize how amazingly lucky I am to have had such a father, and such children.