Lunch Plans

One of my quirks that makes Mike shake his head is my habit of eating a variety of snacks over a period of a few hours--sharp cheddar, some almonds, something leftover from supper, carrots with hummus, cucumber salad, a hard-boiled egg, whatever sounds good--as breakfasts and lunches on my days off instead of taking the time to "eat something real."  I don't think one way is better than the other, but it occurred to me this past week as I brainstormed ways to make this winter better for myself that taking the time on one of my days off every week to cook a "proper" dish that has some fondly-remembered significance to me would be a sweet habit to get into this winter.  Similarly, a friend from high school who is a marathoner mentally dedicates every mile of a race to a different loved one to get her through the hardest stretches and to refocus the endeavor for herself in that way.  Yes, yes, yes.  I've long thought the finest thing about my life is the beautiful people who have been in it, so why not honor them in the days ahead by measuring out the same ingredients and performing the same steps of measuring and boiling and baking that they did or do.  Yesterday I kicked off the project by cooking my grandfather's gnocchi and my grandmother's meatballs.  I cried once as I smelled the potato-flour dough and then again when I tasted my first bite.  I make the meatballs often, and I used to cook the gnocchi a few times a year, but neither Mike nor I should have the extra potato or white flour anymore, and I'm not interested in the healthier versions out there--I want Papa's heavy gnocchi or none at all--so it had been at least five years since I'd made these foods together.  I will modestly but honestly say I hadn't lost my touch:  My grandparents would have proudly recognized both their beloved dishes.  :)  Here's to the best of grandparents, here's to memories of Sunday dinners at their house the first 24 years of my life, and here's to all the LOVE.  How blessed am I.   

♥

Brighter Days and French Breads

"The shortest day has passed, 

and whatever nastiness of weather 

we may look forward to in January and February, 

 at least we notice that the days are getting longer.  

Minute by minute they lengthen out.  

It takes some weeks before we become aware of the change.  

It is imperceptible even as the growth of a child, 

as you watch it day by day, 

 until the moment comes when with a start of delighted surprise 

we realize that we can stay out of doors 

in a twilight lasting for another quarter of a precious hour."
~  Vita Sackville-West, 

December 30th, 1956

♥

I love that passage.  Right now at five-o'clock, it is still light out.  I'm not minding January this year.  Some years, as they say, are better than others.  Last year, almost everything about the month got on my nerves, or so I remember it.  This January finds me feeling hopeful and cozy.  Three loaves of Glenda's French bread are in the middle of their second rise and will soon be placed in the oven to go with tonight's supper--it feels like a soup and bread night here--so the scents of yeast and flour are in the air.  Love.  The last time I made French bread, it was 2001 and I had just turned twenty-four.  I used my grandmother's recipe and ended up with ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! dozens?! of small and almost-inedible loaves.  Grandma had died just a few weeks before and I tried to honor her by making her bread for a family dinner.  Bad, brokenhearted timing, and after hours of kneading, punching-down, forming loaves, and baking:  Bad, brokenhearted bread too.  I trust that tonight's loaves will be better.   The smell of homemade bread, in all the bread's stages, always takes me back to my grandparents' kitchen outside of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.  Just before sliding her loaves into the oven, Grandma would slice a small X into the top of each one.  One Baking Day while I was staying with at my grandparents' house, I decided to add the finishing touch of a letter V to each of the loaves, and Grandma was first perplexed and then amused.  Few things taste as good as fresh bread with butter, and the smell of the loaves instantly transports me back to Grandma's apron-covered side.  It is always--likely forever and always--almost impossible to believe that if I went to my grandparents' house at any given moment, that I wouldn't find them there.  Surely, Grandma is nodding off a bit in her armchair right now as I write this and thinking every time she wakes that she really needs to get up and put together a little supper for her and Papa.  Surely, Papa keeps walking from the back porch to check the thermometer to the kitchen to look out the window at the snow.  If I called right now, I would wake Grandma from her catnap, but she would be tickled to hear from me, and we would want to hear that the other was staying warm and would ask what the other was making for supper.  She would tell me what she and Papa might watch on television that evening--usually a nature program--and would mention that Papa would be walking down to the post office in the morning to mail her next letter to me.  I would tell her that I'm taking down the Christmas tree tonight and that Stuffed has been stretched out like a piece of gum along the bedroom radiator all day.  We would say "I love you" before hanging up and soon we would both settle down to our simple meals of homemade soup and French bread.  

The Crayon Can

It is funny the material things we consider our treasures.  I imagine it is true for everyone from the poorest to the wealthiest amongst us that when asked which belongings we would save from a fire, we would answer with descriptions of our family photos, our love letters, our journals, and as many of those important-to-us-and-unrecognizable-as-riches-to-anyone-else items as we could gather:  Well-worn stuffed animals.  Stones.  Driftwood.  Handmade afghans.  A chipped tea cup.  Her berry-picking hat.  His soft blue  shirt.  When my grandparents were moved into a personal care home a few months before their deaths in 2001, this metal can that Grandma had always kept crayons in was one of the things I wanted from their house and was immediately relieved to know that I had saved. 

There is nothing obviously exceptional about either its exterior or contents.  It is a Folgers-brand coffee can with a handful of crayons, crayon-pieces, and crayon-niblets inside.  I don't remember ever seeing the can with the Folgers label still on it.  Like meals and decor and most everything else at my grandparents' house, the crayons were not fancy.  No glitter-filled crayons here, no crayons that change colors, and no leftover crayons from a highly-coveted 120-pack.  "Burnt sienna," "copper," and "Carnation pink" are as newfangled as these crayons' names get.  I learned this week that the stub of "green-blue" is a collector's item of sorts since the color was retired in 1990.  And because these things were also in the bottom of the can when I salvaged it from Papa and Grandma's house, I consider them equal parts of its sentimental wonder:  A rusted pair of scissors, a couple scraps of Crayola wrappers and once-clear tape--and a folded paper piece, which I would bet good money was from a cut-out heart.  

But the smell!  The crayon smell inside this can!  I take off the plastic lid, and the decades-old crayon scent works like the magic of an uncorked genie:  It is again a Sunday afternoon at Papa and Grandma's gray-shingled house outside of Punxsutawney, and while they, still safe and vibrant with good health, visit with my parents and aunts after dinner, I sprawl out on their moss-green living room carpet and color pictures.  Sometimes the scent takes me back to the late 1970s and early 1980s and I am doodling on the scrap paper Aunt Vee brings from her secretarial job to their house for just this purpose.  Other times, I open the can and find myself a little older, but with the crayons and scissors still around me, designing cards out of the pages of the Sharp's Penn wallpaper catalogs that Grandma saves.  Sometimes, of course, the scent just takes me back to childhood-in-general, and I can't tell what grade I'm in or whether I'm coloring a Christmas decoration or the blues and greens of water and land on a state map for a homework assignment.  Then there are the times the crayon can's scent sends me straight to Papa and Grandma's foyer to look for a not-yet-colored-in page of one of the few coloring books they keep under the crayon can on the tiered brass shelf beside their front door.  Or the times it takes me back to a summer week I am spending at Papa and Grandma's house, and my childhood Beagle is panting beside me while I draw his portrait on the couch.  There is so much going on inside this metal can, you see.  

I keep the crayon can on a hall shelf with other treasures, and it surely mystifies most who see it, dinged and unlabeled as it is.  As is true for us all, its magic lies inside.  Lately I find myself opening it more than usual as I pass by, breathing in deeply and eventually replacing the lid quite reluctantly, wishing its scent could keep me in its hold a little longer.  May I be granted one more day, please, when sticks of wax are all it takes to make my life colorful and pressing down too hard is my biggest concern?  Life has a way of demanding a wee bit more of us than that, though, and perhaps especially for those of us who began it in awe of these boxed rainbows, it is only natural that we sometimes grow frustrated as we figure out, over and over, how to grow up without losing that sense of enchantment.  No worries, Papa and Grandma, your girl is determined to get it right.  The crayon can holds not only the blue-green and green-blue of the wild seas I intend to learn to surf someday, but also the pinks and reds and yellow-oranges of the roses I want to grow around my home.  I will find the balance, I remind myself.  I will try not to worry as the years unfold.  And I will hope that my grandparents say an extra prayer every time they see me reaching for the lid.   

Inside and Outside

Temperatures reached 88°F here yesterday, and since I had started my walk too late in the afternoon, I managed just three miles in the blazing sun before feeling too sick and shivery to continue.  (I passed at least three women pushing babies in strollers and more than a few runners, though, so I have to wonder--as I always do when the tempeatures are this high--if I'm just not sturdy stock.  Babies!  Runners!  In what felt like 90+° heat!  Goodness.)  After returning here for a rest in the air conditioning with an iced tea, I felt good enough to head out for The Walk:  Part II , but by then, it was almost time for Mike to get home from work and I still had to run out for groceries for our supper, so three miles my tally remained.  The days have been glorious this past week, and the nights have been windy with rumbling thunder and lightning like flashbulbs that we see even with closed eyes while we try to fall asleep.  (I just remembered Eddie Rabbitt's 1980s hit "I Love a Rainy Night" and looked it up online only to learn that he died on my birthday back in 1998.  I don't remember hearing about that at all.  Cheers on yet another stormy night this week to Mr. Rabbitt.)  One of this week's walks included the seeking and finding of one of  the country's only remaining wood-bricked streets.  If one of the sweet old brick homes on this little cul-de-sac were available and I had the means to make it happen, I'd be packing moving boxes right now, let me tell you.  It's a charming spot in the city, and examining the wooden blocks that make up its street has been one of the quiet pleasures of this week.  

I have been deliberately and most-obviously cutting back on the time I spend online--you all are in my thoughts and prayers even if I'm not in your comment boxes and email inboxes lately  ♥--and recalibrating how I spend my days so that there is a better balance of fresh air and miles walked and quiet time (reading, napping, writing, puttering around the apartment, etc.) and social time.  Both my personality and my paid work always find me somehow taking care of others, and I am feeling healthier and more content now that I've made taking care of myself more of a priority this spring.  Laundry-doing, email-and-comment-sending, and letter-writing have temporarily fallen by the wayside as I get into new routines and better habits in other areas.  As I've said before, this self-nurturing bit seems to be one of my most-revisited life lessons, and although it's now taken me almost my entire first forty years to figure it out, at least I'm figuring it out.  :)  I had the sweetest dream a few weeks ago that I decided to drive down to my grandparents' house for a surprise visit.  Grandma and I greeted and hugged each other so joyfully, it still makes me smile.  "Oh!  I should do this more often!"  I squealed when I realized how happy this impromptu visit was making us.  "I should have been doing this all along!"  While she and I were catching up with each other in the kitchen, I looked out the window and saw Papa building a giant bee box in their side yard.  (He was a beekeeper [in real life].)  That was really all there was to the dream, but the feeling of it and my gratitude for it have remained with me almost a month later,  both because it was a rare happy dream of my grandparents and because it gave me a taste of the peace and nurturing I've been cultivating here, one steamy mile and one steamy bowl of oatmeal at a time.  

 

 

Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children. ~ Alex Haley

♥  Click to enlarge.  ♥

Grandma proudly labeled this photo "Our Gum tree, fall of 1990," I saw when I inherited her photos in 2001.  Papa and Grandma's trees and gardens were brilliant, and I always loved how their house was nestled behind the trees and Rhododendrons, but to me, the true caption for this picture is Home.  Or Love.  Childhood.  Safety.  Ever since I was a kid, whenever I've had those crazy panicked someone-is-chasing-me sort of nightmares, I've always thought "I have to get to Papa and Grandma's.  I just need to make it to Papa and Grandma's."  And in every dream, every time, their beautiful yard suddenly appears in the distance as I run and I know I just need to reach it in order to be safe.  The Bad Guys disappear at my grandparents' house, Papa and Grandma's bee boxes and raspberry bushes and tree swing serving as my dream world's line of demarcation.  People who have had near-death experiences often report that they passed through a peaceful tunnel and were greeted by a glowing light; When my time comes, I want to find myself in Papa and Grandma's yard--just long enough to get my bearings straight, you understand.  Oddly, it is almost exactly three years to the day since I last wrote here about missing my grandparents' yard.  Maybe autumn just makes me especially nostalgic.  Or maybe there really is some magic in this simple gray-shingled house and the trees that surround it, just as there is something special about every place we love that we feel loves us back.  

 

 

 

 

♥

The Pink Pegboard Project

Like Mike and I now, my grandparents had little kitchen storage space.  The pegboard they kept above their kitchen sink was the first I'd ever seen, and I was always fascinated by it as a kid.  They keep their bottle opener and spatula on their wall?!  When we're done washing and drying these big spoons, we're just going to hang them on the wall?!  Decades--and more than a few small apartments--later, I agree with Papa and Grandma that vertical storage is the way to go.  Until I finished this project Friday afternoon, Mike and I had to paw through two green bins on top of our fridge every time we needed a utensil, so this is one more step toward a happier Mike and Val--well, I care way more than he does, but how could it not make him happier!--and a more organized apartment.  This turned out exactly as I'd envisioned. 

I wish, as I often do after finishing projects like this, that I'd taken a true "before" picture.  The pegboard is a small piece of the pegboard from my parents' garage-wall, and the frame is actually a picture frame I found at Goodwill years ago that used to hold a piece of canvas artwork.  When Mike and I made the trip to my parents' house for our first anniversary last year, I dug the frame out of my former bedroom's closet and brought it back with us, figuring I could use the frame for something.  At some point, it occured to me that the "something" I needed most was more storage space, so the pegboard idea for it was born. 

I cut away the canvas artwork last winter, ripped out all the many staples with pliers some time later, and asked my dad for a piece of 19.5"-square pegboard for my birthday.  (My wish lists are usually this simple, yes.  "What do you want for Christmas?" my parents and brothers will ask me and then quickly add, "And don't say 'Postage stamps and glue!'")  My dad gave me the pegboard and a few starter-hooks when we came home for a visit in April.  I used a birthday gift card from my younger brother to buy a few more hooks.  

Soap and water, wood glue, Super Glue, hammer and nails, and who-knows-how-many coats of green and (first paler pink and then bolder) bubblegum pink acrylic paint and protective gloss varnish later, I finished getting the pegboard together on Friday. 

 And now for us, as it was for Papa and Grandma, finding what we need in our little kitchen is as easy as reaching for its spot on the wall.  "Life is too complicated not to be orderly," as Martha Stewart says, and I agree.  Every time I walk into our kitchen now, I feel a wave of contentment come over me.  ♥

All done.  Cue the relaxed "Ahhhhhhh!"  ♥

Henriette

Today is my grandmother's birthday.  On what would be her final birthday, the local newspaper noted that she was now the oldest person in town, a fact that she rolled her eyes upon sharing with us. 

Grandma was the only child in a family of nine who wasn't born in France.  Her father died not long after her family came to America.  Her mother hated having anyone underfoot while she was in the kitchen, so Grandma didn't learn to cook until she herself had gotten married. My mom still marvels at what a great cook Grandma turned out to be given that, but I am more impressed that someone who had never met any of her own grandparents back in the Old Country ended up being the epitome of a sweet old-fashioned grandmother. 

To her fellow high school students in the Class of 1927, she was "Frenchie."  Papa called her "[his] little Napoleon."  To her nieces and nephews, she was "Aunt Hen."  Her name was Henriette, in tribute to her brother Henri who had died not long before she was born, although it was informally Americanized into "Henrietta."  She hated it, she told me when I was a kid, and I was surprised and responded honestly that I thought it was pretty.  Her foreign name conjured up to my young mind happy images of both cozily-roosting chickens and lovely French ladies. 

Grandma taught me how to play cards and bake bread and peel an apple in one long unbroken strip.  I taught her that when an apple is sliced in half horizontally, a star of seeds appears.  She once said that it was impossible for her not to laugh when she heard me laugh, and she called me "[her] sweet girl." 

She cried while holding my younger brother for the first time, and since his, our older brother's, and Grandma's birthdays are all in February, she would always make a special birthday dinner sometime that month in shared celebration. 

The next-to-last time she and I saw each other was a May afternoon in a city hospital far from her home, and I was wearing a tie-dye t-shirt.  When I leaned over her bed to give her a hug and kiss, Grandma took in my wildly-colored top and weakly commented, "My arms look like your shirt."  Poor Grandma's skin was splotchy with bruises in various stages by that point.  Her observation was the last dry-humored comment of hers that we smiled at together.   

A rainbow appeared soon after she died, and as she had requested, she was buried with a letter my dad had written her from Vietnam.  She had wanted me to have her writing desk and handmade crochet tablecloth, and I do, but it is her scrapbooks and recipes and family papers and photos I treasure more.  She has appeared in a few precious dreams since I've died, and one helped me gain perspective at a time I felt I was spinning out of control in life.  

I think of her when I see cottage gardens, round loaves of homemade bread, delicate script handwriting, canned goods, cantalope, Poinsettias, political cartoons, poetry anthologies, pastel mints, and barkcloth.  When my ex-boyfriend and I visited her grave a couple weeks after she died, I left her a letter promising, among other things, to try always to be her sweet girl.  That I am forever her granddaughter is one of the most beautiful-to-me things about my life.  I miss her more, not less, every year.  And I hope she still laughs when she hears me laugh.  

All Things Wise and Wonderful

While at the thrift shop last week, I spotted a paperback copy of one of the books from Jame's Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small series.  Do you know these books?  My grandmother loved them and always told me I should try them, but although I devoured just about every other book and magazine in her and Papa's house, I somehow could never get into Herriot's writings.  I truly tried.  I read enough of them as a kid--then as a pre-teen, then as a teenager, then as a twenty-something--to remember, without even needing to skim through the book's yellowed pages for a refresher at Goodwill last week, how the veterinary surgeon/narrator was always being telephoned in the middle of the night by farmers in need of his help and how he always seemed to be traveling and working in the cold in the wee hours of the morning.  Grandma would urge me to take one or more of her Herriot books home with me after a visit, but I never did.  "I just can't get into them," I'd apologize to her.  I loved animals and nature and memoirs and history and (the idea of) England but still couldn't connect with her beloved book series.  It's just like that sometimes.  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was another of Grandma's favorites, and she was always disappointed that I couldn't get into that story either. 

I would instead leave her and Papa's house with a paper grocery bag full of her "Best Loved" and "America's Favorite" poetry books, her biographies of John or Jacqueline Kennedy, her Reader's Digest Condensed Books, and her Golden Press nature field guides.  While looking at the tree book at their house, I would hold it up and ask Papa after every other page, "Have you seen this tree before?  Have you ever seen one of these?  Do they have these around here?"  Ditto for the American Birds book.  But the Wildflowers book was all Grandma and I, the two of us curled up on "her" chair in the corner of the living room or rocking side by side on the floral barkcloth-cushioned front porch swing as we slowly turned the pages.  Neither Grandma nor I were ever people who fell asleep easily or quickly, and it was while we were looking at the illustrated flowers one day that she told me that when she was in bed and couldn't sleep, she would try to think of a flower that begin with each letter of the alphabet.  It is funny what you remember.  When the time came in 2001 to help my parents clean out Papa and Grandma's house, I left behind many of their books because I assumed others in the family would also want them and I felt the person who had gifted my grandparents with certain books should be the one to hold on to them now.  I saved the "Disney's Wonderful World of Reading" hardcovers that Grandma had read to me before I knew how, and that I would later read and reread to her, in our afghan-covered reading chair, and I took a few more things from her bookcases, but I forced myself to be fair and let go of the rest.  

It was bittersweet when I finally read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn years ago.  Grandma was right and I was wrong:  It is one of my favorite books.  If Grandma had still been alive, it would have been something we would have talked about, or if we weren't going to see each other soon, I would have mentioned it in one of my letters to her.  I wish I could tell her that just recently, I shared with Mike Francie's mom's wise way of helping Francie feel "casually extravagant" by letting her dump her grown-cold coffee down the drain.  I love that. I also love thinking that Grandma knew me in a way that I didn't yet know myself as she watched me pull and then re-shelf books from her collection all those years.  She wouldn't be surprised, then, to hear that I bought the paperback of the James Herriot book last week--and that I am loving it too.  I have raced through the first forty-four chapters and will soon be done with the rest, and I've been bookmarking used copies on amazon of his other works so I can buy them with Christmas money later this month.  I want more, more, more!  Yorkshire is now home of the "World of James Herriot visitor attraction," I've learned this past week.  And an online shop of Herriot merchandise is, they say, coming soon!  While I can't buy Grandma a trinket from the store or museum and it is now too late for more book discussions out on the porch swing, I believe she's somehow shared my excitement this past week as I dip into Mr. Herriot's tales of performing Caesareans on sheep and pulling the village tailor's pins from the pads of his dog's paws.  I really think she knows.  As I cuddle up with the book in my own afghan-covered reading chair this week, it only seems right to believe, given all she knew before and all she knew all along, that somehow, Grandma knows.

Flea Market Cat and the Year of (Not) Letting Go

While making my way through muddy paths and blustery winds at the flea market with family last weekend, I spotted this antique toy on a table.  I'm not one for knickknacks but fell for this simple old black and white cat, and after handing my eight dollar bills across the table to the elderly woman who was racing to cover the rest of her wares before the next rain, it was mine.  The older I get, the more I love the quote from William Morris that advises us to "have nothing in [our] houses that [we] do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."   This cat fits the bill for me.  I also love the advice to get rid of a few things for every one thing you bring into your home, so sometime this week, I'll be putting together another bag to donate to Goodwill.  A memoir of my mid-thirties would surely have a chapter titled "Clutter Be Gone."  Too much "stuff" makes me antsy.  Unless it's of books, I despise piles. 

At 24, I wasn't like this.  While discussing one of the "Hoarders" TV shows a couple weeks ago, I told Mike about the time I was shopping at a Salvation Army store in my hometown a few weeks after my family and I had finished cleaning out my grandparents' house and came across some of their belongings on the store's shelves:  My parents had donated to the store the items from Papa and Grandma's house that no one in the family had claimed.  I hadn't wanted these things before, but I suddenly felt sick at the thought of strangers owning the contents of Papa and Grandma's home.  I bought back all their books that I could find on the shelves, along with a porcelain swan that had always sat on top of their piano and that was now marked with a neon green price sticker.  My grandparents had just died in the two months before, and I wasn't ready to let go even this little bit.  Not ready at all.  I made peace with it eventually, and at some point, the books and swan made their way to the Salvation Army a second time, but I spent the spring and early summer of 2001 surrounding myself with boxes and piles of Papa and Grandma's belongings and berating myself for not having "saved" more of it from their house in the first place.  And what little money I was earning that miserable year and the next, I spent too much of on more "stuff" that further cocooned and comforted me.  One afternoon, the mailman delivered an embarrassingly tall stack of packages onto my doorstep only to return to his truck for a second stack--and in front of my younger brother, whose respect is chief amongst those I'd never want to lose.  It was easy for awhile to tell myself and others that I was just buying what I needed for my new apartment or "treating" myself after a hard year of too many disappointments and losses.  Although I was far from a hoarder, I was, in those heartbroken days of 2001 and 2002, surrounding myself with Any Little Thing That Would Make Me Feel Better, even if only by association--This "new-old" damask tablecloth is just like one of Grandma's--or because of misplaced hope--Maybe I'll be wearing this new sky-blue sundress the day my ex-boyfriend finally comes back to me.  I don't laugh at the people being buried alive by their possessions on TV shows.  Sometimes tablecloths and dresses mean so much more than tablecloths and dresses, and sometimes you need to hang on to them awhile.  Some peoples' "awhile" never ends, as those hoarding programs show us, and I feel sorry for them and their loved ones. 

My own "awhile" lasted about a year and a half.  By the end of 2003, I had donated or sold on amazon and eBay most everything that had before seemed so soothing.  I had healed some.  The vintage tablecloth wasn't necessary.  The sundress wouldn't be seen by the ex-boyfriend.  I would continue to remember reading on Grandma's lap as a child even if I gave away most of her books.  Papa and Grandma's house would still live in my memories after its foyer's porcelain swan found a new home.  Eventually, I just realized I'd be okay without it all and that I was, when it came down to it, okay without Papa and Grandma and the ex, as well (if I had to be, and God knows how stubbornly I struggle to accept a loss).  But what you need--all that you really need--I learned in those years, you carry within you.  Death cannot steal it from you, not really.  Goodbyes do not negate it, even when your present seems to have cancelled-out your past.  If the wooden flea market cat makes me happy, I enjoy it.  (It suits me, for sure, and it does look sweet amid the autumn leaves and little pumpkins.)  I enjoy it all the more knowing--finally and truly--that I'd be okay without it too. 

From Februaries Past

This is one of my most-treasured photos and was taken at my grandparents' house in February 1998 after a special dinner that Grandma had made to celebrate her and my two February-born brothers' birthdays. My family was getting ready to leave, but I insisted on a few pictures, and thank God: I love that this moment was captured on film. I was a few months shy of 21 here, and Papa had turned 86 a few months prior. I recently reread something I'd written in my journal years ago in which I mentioned that for awhile after Papa died in 2001, I would sleep holding one of his old shirts. I had forgotten that. I do remember working off and on for years on a poem about him that I began months before he died and never was able to finish to my satisfaction. "You were my first hero, Papa," it began. "...The first man I ever said 'I love you' to." Eleven Februaries later, those are still all the things that first come to mind when I think of my grandfather: We made each other laugh, I was devastated when he died, he was my first hero, and he was the first man to hear my "I love you." And I could not have been any more blessed.