Eulogy for Grandfather

Eulogy for Grandfather

My grandfather taught us so much.

When my sister and I were little, he taught us how to paint with oils on smooth pieces of wood, instructing us on how to blend colors or make certain brush strokes, telling us that "there are no straight lines in nature," to help us paint better trees.

He taught us how to work with clay, too, and made us our own clay-working tools. He taught us how to roll pennies from the piggy bank he'd fill up every week. He taught us about the birds flying into the birdfeeder next to the family room window. He taught me about words, too, in one memorable exchange advising me to use the words "equine posterior" rather than their more common alternative.

But most of what my grandfather taught us he taught us indirectly, without speaking. Going to museums with him was often a chore for me as a kid, because he would have to stop and read every plaque next to every painting or item, every so often calling us back to something we'd tired of already to explain what he'd just learned-but mostly, just observing, drinking in everything he could see with quiet patience. He never went to college, but he taught me more about education-and the value of being a self-educator-than I could learn in any school.

My grandfather made miraculous things with lumps of clay and blocks of wood. It wasn't until much later that I realized how well-outfitted his workshop was, full of specialized tools; he'd taught my father how to be the same kind of hands-on man, and I thought all Grandpas and Dads had special lathes, band saws, table saws, jig saws, buckets of nails, vast arrays of screwdrivers and dozens of varieties of sandpaper in their basements.

One birthday, I remember, he made special. After we'd unwrapped our other toys, my sister and I were presented with identical boxes with the Hallmark logo on them. They were presented with great ceremony, and we were confused but excited.

We opened them at the same time. Inside my sister's box was a diorama of our dog Lady playing with a soccer ball out on the lawn. Her back paw was stomping tiny silk flowers into garden dirt rendered in sawdust. Mine was a black horse leaping over a stone wall-perfect down to the textured wood that formed the rock.