A Big Lap to Fill

December 2023

I think a great deal about my new grandson, Emeric. Well, he’s relatively new, as he just turned three.  We have a great time together.  Playing tackle, taking walks, playing with his trucks on the floor or building forts and carwashes in my family room.  He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s pretty lucky.  His grandfather is fairly young and healthy.  Able to do things a three-year-old likes to do.  Which is mainly acting like a three-year-old!  Rough housing as well as using our imagination in a variety of ways.  I love it!

I only had one grandfather, and he was seventy-six years old when I was born.  He was well beyond the roughhousing stage. Yet he still was a major influence on my life. I was pondering this, as well as a few other things, as I was playing with my own grandson. One of the things I was thinking was that my grandfather would be my grandson’s great, great grandfather.  Wow!  That thought almost blew my mind.

Of course, I do not remember my grandfather when I was three.  I suspect Emeric won’t remember me at this age either.  But by the time he is six or seven years old and beyond, I hope he can remember.  I’ll still be relatively young, and hopefully healthy. With that, I anticipate still being a physical presence in his life.  Still tackling each other and rolling around on the floor together.  I’ll continue to enjoy that.  But that’s not how it was for me. It was very different.  In a sense, maybe better.

My Grandfather was a wonderful man. He was born in 1886. So, when I was three years old, he was already 79.  By the time I really remember him, I was around 8-years old, so he was 84.  But I still have vivid memories of him.  While we didn’t “play”, as he was quite infirm when my memories of him begin, he was fun in his own way. 

At the time, he was sound of mind, but his body was failing.  Likely due to having worked his fingers to the bone for his whole life.  Regardless, he certainly spent as much time with me as I would let him. I was a typical 8-year-old and forever on the go.  Especially because my grandparents lived on a farm.  That, in and of itself, offers a great deal for a young boy to do. There were too many rural diversions for a young boy to sit still and listen to stories.  Yet thankfully I often did.

My grandfather liked to chat with his grandsons.  Each of us took our turns with him.  Even as a six- or eight-year-old, I would sit on his lap while he smoked his pipe and just listen.  If I concentrate, I can still smell the tobacco and see the can it came in.  I’m getting misty eyed just thinking about it!  He would puff on his pipe, and he would talk and ask me questions. 

He was a quiet man, but also a great storyteller, and I enjoyed my time with him completely.  But most of what he told me didn’t mean a whole lot until I got much older.  It has taken me, maybe even until now, to appreciate it.  Now that I have my own grandson to begin to talk with, and to tell stories to.

I still remember some of the tales that he told me. At least the key points of them.  He was often just looking back on his life and telling me about it. Reminiscing.  Talking about stuff that was certainly on his mind at the time. And let me tell you, he had lived through some significant world events and technological advancements in his long life. Some of this is obviously from the stories he told me as a child, mixed in with bits of information I gleaned as I got older, and more interested in history.  Especially the history of my family.

My grandpa’s name was August Conrad.  August is my middle name and Conrad is my Grandson’s.  Something that makes me immeasurably proud. August’s family had emigrated to the US from Germany before he was born. He was very proud of his German heritage, but generally spoke little about it.  He would throw in a few German words and phrases every now and again just to tease me. 

He told me of his own childhood memories, of being my age and meeting people that had once been slaves, a term I was unfamiliar with at the time.  Sadly, he called them “Darky’s”, a term that could not possibly be used today. Not comfortably anyway.  To me, as a young boy, I just thought he was describing their skin. I was too young to have developed any racial bias. But this is how I learned what slavery was. I learned it from him.  A deep and troubling concept for an eight-year-old.

He also liked to talk about how easy life was in the present, compared to when he was a child.  He recalled the times before there were radios, phones, cars, planes, movie theaters or television.  He said he never used a toilet until he was my eldest brother’s age, which was in his twenties.  He didn’t have electricity in his house until then either.  The list could go on and on. 

I remember it being hard for me to believe there were ever such times, but now I certainly understand. Just think about living a life during the era that brought forth so many of those advancements!  Things we now take for granted.  Things that are now foundational to our whole modern world.

It was 1970.  He explained to me how we had just landed on the moon.  He told me that his father had told him that could never possibly happen.  He told me a story about someone called Charles Lindbergh and how he had flown in a tiny airplane across a huge ocean all alone. Something he described as quite heroic.   He had so many stories!  And it didn’t matter to me if these things were recent or from the distant past.  I really didn’t know the context. I just knew that sitting there with him was so comfortable, so meaningful.  Even then, I knew this.  Without even knowing why.

His hands were rough and scarred.  I asked why.  I asked why about everything!  So, he told me stories about working as a young man.  His first job other than farm work was in the lumber camps in northern Michigan when he was 18. He described the work as hard and dangerous, but exciting for a young and adventurous man.  I thought it was so cool that my grandpa was a lumberjack!  He said that it was hard work, as his hands proved, but it made him enough money to buy his farm. 

He also worked in a factory for a while too.  Impressing upon an eight-year-old that you must do whatever it takes to make ends meet.  I remember us both looking at his hands as he told me these things.  The history of his life was written there. Memories for him that were in the process of becoming memories for me.

On his lap, I started to become infatuated with time.  With what had come before me. How things change.  How things that seem impossible, can really happen.  This was truly something that impacted the rest of my life.  The time I spent on his lap made me a dreamer.  Becoming someone that saw the past as the road to the future. But more than anything, my grandfather gave me a sense of time and how things change as you pass through the stages of your life.  Which is so meaningful to me now, that I am entering the latter portion of my own. 

I really loved that man!  I wish I would have had more moments on his lap.  Heard more stories.  I am sure he had so many more to tell. Sadly, he died from complications of a stroke in 1973. This was devastating for me. It was the first time in my life that I experienced a loss of this magnitude.  He had taught me so much about life.  And in his passing, taught me about death. Over time, I realized that I had lost the man, but I have never needed to lose the gifts he gave to me.  The inspiration. 

Now as a grandfather myself, I hope to inspire my grandson in the same way.  Or in some other way.  I know it will have to be done in a different way regardless.  It’s such a different world! Yet, I hope that in some way I can stir within him a passion that ignites a fire that lasts the rest of his life. Like my grandfather did for me.  Just to give him memories greater than as a playmate on the floor. 

I hope I can move him in such a way that when he is 60 years old, he will think about me, and consider telling his own grandson some story I told him, or some lesson I taught him.  I would consider that to be a pretty good deal. Maybe even that I had done my job.  I had a very high bar set for me, that is for sure!  I have some big shoes to fill.  Better said, I have a big lap to fill!