Gratitude Generation; TMGI Day 5

All Saints Day and all Souls Day/Dia de los Muertos are about to arrive, and although he is never far from my memories or from my thoughts, commemorating the lives of those whom we have lost immediately invokes the memory of my grandfather.

 
For him, I am ultimately grateful.

 
The gratitude I have for having had him as my grandfather began to take deep roots in my early teens.  My grandfather held a mythic quality in my eyes, and the better I got to know him, the closer we grew, the more special and seemingly other-worldly he was in my eyes.  It was one of those rare relationships that actually seemed to become more idealized as we learned more truths about one another.
I would imagine that many reading this feel the same way about one or some of their grandparents.  It’s easy to say that I didn’t know anyone like him when I was a child, but through high school, college, and even after, it grew increasingly obvious that he was unique among men.  Quiet and dignified, completely without affect, honest and measured…I never got even a whiff of insecurity or neediness.  He was a man who met life on his terms, and worked his whole life to be better, smarter, and more able than he was the day before.
We took walks in the northern Arizona forests, drove through the back roads of his youth, and spent countless hours talking at his kitchen table.  I think the thing about grandparents is that we get to know them when we’re children, when they are at completely different places in their lives than when our parents were born.  Who my grandfather revealed himself to be to me was a self-made man of extraordinary character, he modeled an old-school masculinity that was never mysoginistic or mean, but rooted in the strength that finds validation purely from within, and brings with it the kind of inner peace that is all but extinct now.
But perhaps what I miss most about him are the parts that all but elude articulation.  Things like the silly face he made when trying to make me laugh as a child, or the way I’d feel like the most important teenager on the planet when he’d say my name, or that knowing grin he’d shoot me from across the room that was his way of saying “I love you.”
These thumbnail sketches of my memories of him don’t nearly do our relationship justice.  But when meditating on the notion of gratitude this week, there was no image stronger than his place in my life.  He was the ever-present catylist of bravery and strength; his friendship permeated and informed everything from an enduring self-belief to my understanding of loyalty.  It is because of his influence on my life that I understand that gratitude and inspiration themselves are not to be found in ancient scrolls or sweeping gestures, they are not found in self-help books or clever sayings…they are found in the lifelong and everlasting love that exisits in the small moves, the small moments, and unparalleled devotion of my grandfather.

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