To my left, as I sit here, there is a painting on my wall. It's a Bob-Ross-esque mountain, a bit too overpowering with the snow taking up half of the canvass, a clumsy touch of blue. Burnt out pine trees still stand in the foreground, with impossible green boughs, and large rocks, too round to be the jagged basalt they represent. In the middle, a stream pours implausibly from the side of a hill into a lake, All the water is calm, including the 30-degree water shooting from the hill. In all, it has a deft perspective hand from a man who has traveled, but not enough to see what he is painting.
It was painted by my grandfather. I love it.
I love it because my grandfather was not a man of perfection, though he was unafraid to be imperfect. That was his crowning glory: that he DID, and was unafraid. One of the last stories he told me, before the Alzheimers made cogent thought impossible and time and distance took his memory away completely, was about a day that he had three jobs.
He was fired from the first, I don't recall the vocation, but work was slow and he was let go. Within hours he had a job shoveling coal into people's coal cellars, but one customer made him angry and he said "to heck with this," walking off the job. Another few hours later he had another job. It didn't matter. He was a doer, and doers are always welcome in the world, aren't they?
He found his craft as a printer, printing with lead typeset and converting to computer set as he could. I remember marveling at a machine that clamped paper down and brought a heavy metal edge down to cut the ream of cardstock neatly. I remember being impressed at lead type, how messy it was, seeing drips of lead everywhere, marveling at being able to set type backwards as was done back then. I never saw him do it, but I'll bet it was something he relished - not because it was a particularly incredible feat to set block letters backwards in a certain order, but because it took skill and intelligence to do it. I have the same fascination with doing things because they are interesting, the definition of "interesting" being new, unusual, difficult.
Somehow these things are worthwhile. That, perhaps, was my grandfather's gift to me. The joy to do and experience it firsthand. Today I play the banjo, something he did, something unusual, and it is a fitting tribute.
It was painted by my grandfather. I love it.
I love it because my grandfather was not a man of perfection, though he was unafraid to be imperfect. That was his crowning glory: that he DID, and was unafraid. One of the last stories he told me, before the Alzheimers made cogent thought impossible and time and distance took his memory away completely, was about a day that he had three jobs.
He was fired from the first, I don't recall the vocation, but work was slow and he was let go. Within hours he had a job shoveling coal into people's coal cellars, but one customer made him angry and he said "to heck with this," walking off the job. Another few hours later he had another job. It didn't matter. He was a doer, and doers are always welcome in the world, aren't they?
He found his craft as a printer, printing with lead typeset and converting to computer set as he could. I remember marveling at a machine that clamped paper down and brought a heavy metal edge down to cut the ream of cardstock neatly. I remember being impressed at lead type, how messy it was, seeing drips of lead everywhere, marveling at being able to set type backwards as was done back then. I never saw him do it, but I'll bet it was something he relished - not because it was a particularly incredible feat to set block letters backwards in a certain order, but because it took skill and intelligence to do it. I have the same fascination with doing things because they are interesting, the definition of "interesting" being new, unusual, difficult.
Somehow these things are worthwhile. That, perhaps, was my grandfather's gift to me. The joy to do and experience it firsthand. Today I play the banjo, something he did, something unusual, and it is a fitting tribute.
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