Meeting Grandpa

For most of my formative years (those years when you learn to walk, use a toilet, read, write, pick friends, kiss a girl, drive, and dream about your adult life) I lived near my extended family.  Both uncles and their families and both sets of grandparents were a bike ride away.  Allow me one asterisk for that last sentence.  My mother's dad - Grandpa Mac, short for McVay - died shortly before my second birthday.  I have no conscious memory of him.

Until this last November.  I was home (Ohio) visiting my mother, father and sisters, and while I was alone with my mom she told me about the day her father died.  Mom said that Grandpa Mac and I were pretty tight, so much that whenever we went to their house I would immediately go from room to room until I found him.

On the day he passed from this life my mother and I went to Grandma Mac's house, and when I stepped in the door I stopped, looked around, and just shook my head from side to side.  I knew he was gone.

Even now, as I type those words, my eyes tear because somewhere down inside of me there is a lingering bond to a man I can't remember.  The moment Mom told me it were as though I had just been told I had a long lost twin or something.  I was dumbfounded.  And almost immediately I began to love this mysterious man who I can only recall through faded photographs and second-hand stories.  The child-heart in me revived and I have thought about him more often in the last two months than I have in the last 45 years.

You might think this would create a sadness, a longing for something that is irretrievably lost, but it hasn't.  Instead, I am filled with a hope and an impatient joy as I look ahead to seeing him again someday.  I will have eternity to know this man I forgot I knew.

And I can assure you of this - on that day I will go through every room until I find him.

I miss you Grandpa Mac, but it won't be long.