The Daddy Letters - Grandparents July 17, 2011

Dear TJ, I want to tell you about grandparents. Today we went and saw my grandmother, your great-grandmother. She is in a nursing home about 2 hours away. I am so thankful that she is still alive to be able to meet you. She is the only great-grandparent on my side that you were ever able to meet. Your mothers’ grandma is still alive out in Idaho and you are able to see her when you go out there. You also met her grandfather a couple times. He passed away last fall. The way I sometimes think about what we did today, it becomes mind-boggling. I can’t even picture you riding a bike on your own right now. But someday, though, if I live long enough, I may be able to meet your grandchildren. It is a crazy thing to think about. I wonder what your grandchildren will know about me? I really don’t know much about my great-grandparents at all. I wonder who they were really were. Sure, I could see pictures and read names. I could even know what they did for a living. But who were they really? Will what we know about our ancestors be any more accessible as technology progresses? Will the millions of photos and words that we put on Facebook and the Internet really last years and years? Will all of this that I am writing still be there 65 years from now when your grandchildren go searching for them? Will it all still be there somewhere floating out in the Internet? Or should I still be printing all this out and putting it in an envelope that can someday be found in an attic, the words faded and the paper stiff? It reminds me of this song by Whiskeytown called “Houses on the Hill”. It is a feat of virtuoso songwriting. In only two verses and couple refrains, Ryan Adams tells an incredible and heartbreaking story with a vividness and detail that most writers could only hope to accomplish with ten times the words. He does it in under four minutes with about 75 words. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBPa_JzNWBg. But it all starts with him finding some letters in an attic. Maybe someday, years from now, far off relatives way down line find these words that I am writing now to you. Maybe they will read them with eyes that sort of look like mine. I hope they do. I hope that they find comfort and enjoyment in them. I hope it makes them smile and that maybe that smile will look a little like yours. But today, we saw grandma Dorothy. She was born in 1920 and that makes her 90 years old. In a massive world of sweet grandmothers, she is one of the sweetest. Mentally, she is doing remarkably well for someone her age. Physically, she has some challenges and is in a motorized wheelchair. We spent and hour and half with her and it was wonderful. She asked all about you. You have a brand new Thomas the Train engine that you were so proud to show her. She sat there and watched you play with it with a big smile on her face. I suppose that today I wish you were older, old enough to talk to her, to have a conversation with her, to really remember her. I wish that for all of my grandparents that you never got a chance to meet or really know. Sometimes I will get on wikipedia and look up random important people. I’ll look up ancient kings or something. It will astonish me that these men ruled whole empires for decades, yet I have never heard their names. No one has except scholars that study them. These were the most important men of their time. They accomplished more than any one person could dream. Yet, in the end, hardly anyone has any idea who they are. I suppose it doesn’t really matter. We all live our lives. We love and we laugh. We try and succeed. Or we fail and we try again. We all do great things and we all do things that aren’t so great. There is so much life that happened before me. So much that added up to the sum of what I am now. I am so thankful to my grandparents, to their parents and their grandparents. All the way up the line. There was probably a man that lived 200 years ago that had a nose like mine, or a laugh like mine, I want to thank him for everything he has given me. Maybe someone somewhere was a king. I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter, because I am here to tell you now that you have a grandmother. Her name is Dorothy. Today, she let you sit with her on her motorized chair and she took you for a ride around the nursing home. She let you press the horn of her chair. “HONK! HONK! HONK!” You had a huge grin on your face and when you left, you blew her a kiss goodbye and said, “Bye, Bye gate-gandma”. That is enough for me, I think. That is enough for her, I know. And, for now, I think that is enough for you. But I will make myself promise to keep telling you stories about her, and about her husband, Fred. And about all the other people that have given us a place to come from. A place to start. A place to look back at every so often and simply, say “thank you”. See you next week, Daddy