Eulogy for Grandfather

Eulogy for Grandfather

My grandfather and I had a number of secrets between us. Most of these, I can't tell; the salient feature of a secret is not the matter contained within the secret, but the trust implied.

But I'll tell you one secret, because I think it's important, and because I think that my grandfather won't mind. It's a little secret, without much drama to it: My grandfather once told me that he would have liked to have been a history teacher.

Like I said, it's a little secret. It's a little dream. But ever since he told it to me, four years ago now, the image of my grandfather in front of a class, teaching history, has stayed fixed in my memory. It is something that seems right and true.

Part of this may have to do with the fact that, in a very real sense, my grandfather embodied history to me. I have only just now come to that point in my life where time has loosed itself from its moorings, and memory has begun to develop an appreciable depth. But to me, my grandfather always seemed to have that depth.

We can all remember asking our grandparents about their lives; it's fascinating to a young person, because here is someone talking about a time and a place that never existed or could exist for that young person. Here, before you, is someone who has traveled through time.

And as you reconstruct the past with a grandparent, you also reconstruct the person. My grandfather had always been my grandfather: Older, balding, and grumpy. But he was also once a child, who didn't speak English until he was five years old. He was a teenager who used to play baseball. He was a young man who was dragged to a USO dance by a buddy, there to meet the woman he would marry. There's a richness of a life that can only be told though a recitation of its history. My grandfather came truly alive to me when I knew his life.

A place and its history are meaningless unless there is a context in which to place it. The proper context for my father was within his family. Families are also the embodiment of history: The individual elements change as the men and women of it pass though time, but the family remains. My grandfather told me that in the little Italian town from which our family came, there is a book that lists the names of our family back hundreds of years.