Alice: "How long is forever?"
White Rabbit: "Sometimes, just
one second."
-- Lewis Carroll, "Alice in Wonderland"
My maternal
grandfather was one of the two most influential men in my life throughout my
boyhood. There is no photograph of him doing what he did in one of my favorite
memories of him, so I selected this random shot of an empty rocking chair
to symbolize him and his absence and my memory of him. His heart gave out when he was 69 years old.
The memory is one
of him sitting in a rocking chair, reading, often smoking his pipe, with a
glass of water or lemonade and a radio playing music on a stand next to him. In the winter, he would sit
inside in what we called the "long room," often with his feet next to an
old-fashioned, wood-burning cookstove. In the summer, he would sit outside, on
the porch if it was raining or in the shade of a large, old tree on a sunny-hot and a humid day.
He was a
voracious reader, a habit he gave to my mother, and from the two of them the
custom passed along to me. Today is his birthday and I miss his presence ....
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