Magical Mondays: A Grandfather's Gifts

(Posting on Sunday due to time constraints)

I had originally planned to blog about a different topic for this Monday, but something happened Friday that changed my mind.

This may ramble a bit, but please bear with me as I try to keep to the timeline of important events here. :) Some of you may recognize this because I talked about it in someone else's blog, but now there's more.

Some background: My parents divorced when I was six and I only saw my father a handful of times after that up until age 11, then he disappeared from our lives. My paternal grandfather, too, disappeared after the divorce until I was about 15. He just showed up on our doorstep one day--he'd hired someone to find us--and said he didn't care what his son or my mother said, he wasn't going to go on cutting his grandkids out of his life. Apparently, our dad told him our mom didn't want him coming around, and told our mom his father didn't want to see us, thus the breach.

Over the years, he kept in touch and my brother even lived with him for a years. About six years ago I visited him and found out that he'd written 21 books over the years; something I didn't know and was pleased to discover. He had self-published, and he autographed a copy of one his books for me--it's one of my treasures--and said I could edit his next book.

Go forward to around May of the following year: I had a feeling I was forgetting something important that was due to happen on July 18th. My daughter's birthday is the 14th, so I knew that wasn't it. I thought maybe I'd forgotten a friend's birthday, so I called her to verify the date; she said no, not until October 18. Perturbed, I searched the house for clues as to what I was forgetting and found nothing. Nevertheless, I circled the date on all my calendars at work and home. It wasn't until I bolted out of bed on the morning of the 19th that I realized what day it was: my grandfather had died the day before, and I'd circled the date two months before it happened.

A couple of weeks later, I was sitting in the living room thinking about two men that I had been semi-dating at the time and wondering if I ought to continue, pick one, or drop both when I heard my grandfather's voice in the room loud and clear, saying, "Ain't neither one of 'ems worth a shit!" It shook me pretty badly because it sounded as if he were in the room right next to me. Not long afterward, I found out he was exactly right--they weren't. :)

Fast-forward to this past week and bear in mind that the first and last time I've seen my father in the past 30+ years was at my granddad's funeral five years ago.

Thursday night, I was remembering some pictures taken at my grandparent's house 14 years ago, but that had gotten lost over the years. I had seen one when I went to get my things in Arizona and thought I had brought it home with me, but searched and couldn't find it. It was the last one I had. I wished there were some way I could get copies of all of them, especially digital ones, but knew there was no way. No one else had any, and they weren't taken with a digital camera, so I was out of luck. It made me really sad.

The next day, I got an email from my dad. It said, "We were going through some old pictures today and came across these from your Grandpa." Attached were all the photos I thought were gone forever.

He's still looking out for me.