What I Learned About My Grandfather by Finding His Gift

My grandfather is a man of very few words. He grew up in an era where you did not talk about yourself much. You worked, you provided, you showed up. Talking about what you felt or what you loved or what you wished you had done differently was not really on the menu.

This makes him wonderful and also nearly impossible to shop for because you cannot ask him what he wants and expect a useful answer. He will say nothing, I have everything I need, and he will mean it in the same way he means everything he says, which is completely.

I decided one year to do a little quiet research.

I asked my mom what my grandfather was like when he was young. Not as a father, not as a husband, but as a person. Before all the roles settled over him.

She thought about it and said he used to draw. When he was a teenager and into his twenties, before life got busy and full of obligations, he drew constantly. Pencil sketches. Mostly buildings and street scenes. She had not thought about it in years. She said he was actually good.

I went looking. I found one of those old sketchbooks in a box my mom had from his house. Three drawings, loose pages, folded. A street corner. A building facade. A fire escape with a lot of attention paid to the ironwork.

I had them framed. All three together, in a simple matching set.

When he unwrapped them he went very still.

He looked at them for a long time without saying anything. Then he pointed to the fire escape drawing and said: I did that from a window on the fourth floor of my first apartment. I had forgotten I still had these.

He talked for twenty minutes. About that apartment, about the neighborhood, about being twenty-three years old in a city that felt enormous and full of possibility. I had never heard any of it.

I did not give him the drawings. He already had them. I gave him permission to remember who he was before he became my grandfather. That turned out to be a very good gift.