Thursday, May 4, 2017

Ghosts

Maybe he's looking on from his distance, beer in hand. If so, I imagine he looks hopefully for signs that he left something -- anything behind. He looks to see if he mattered. 

And I'm guessing he sees something of himself -- a couple of grandsons he didn't stick around to meet but who resemble him -- one might even say strikingly so.

He set the life course for at least a few of his older kids. I'm sure he sees that. And the ones whose course he didn't help set, he did anyway. His absence changed the course of their lives just as surely as his overwhelming presence set the former's.

Life is busy. I'm guessing that most of us folk don't spend even a second of each day wondering about the folk who came before.

Besides, such wonderings don't net much. We can contemplate the butterfly wing inceptions to the winds that fill our sails today. But ultimately we mostly just keep our hand to the rudder. We can't control the wind. We just set the sail.

And it's hard to be nostalgic about people we never knew (though Ancestry.com has built an entire business betting that we do so anyway). Heck, of my two grandads I only ever met one. I've wondered about the one I never met. What I know of the one I did meet, the disinterest was mutual. So I know that absent grandparents don't mean much.

Still, occasionally something will make us wonder where we came from.

Today, Dad would have turned 100.

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