Happy 101st Birthday, Grandpa!

Dear Gramps,

Your memory lives on in my heart, filling me with joy and warmth. How lucky I was to have you! The best parts of you live on in me.

Thank you for tickling my feet when I was little. I tickle the feet and bellies of the children in my life until they laugh and squirm. This touching connection is one of the things they love about me and I love about myself.

Thank you for being civic-minded and writing letters to the newspaper and marrying a woman who saved those letters and newspaper articles in a scrapbook and showed them to her grandchildren. I am involved in my community, too, and have kept my letters-to-the-editor and newspaper articles.

Thank you for being one-half of the team that made Dad.

Thank you for keeping a notebook of your daily activities. Written like a journalist without opinion. A record of what was important to you. I'm in that notebook.

Thank you for the words you added at the end of Grandma's faithful letters and for saving 30 years of my letters. I saved all of your and Grandma's letters, too. Evidence of our mutual love.

Thank you for taking us up north for fishing vacations. I loved being with you in a cabin.

Thank you for the stamp sets at Christmas and the checks that arrived out of the blue.

Thank you for embracing Umeeta and then Danielle in my partnerships with them. "She's part of the family, too" you said as you stepped forward and asked for the camera from Umeeta so you could take her picture with Grandma and me.

Thank you for telling stories about your neighbors, relatives and friends who you visited so often. You modeled for me how a good friend stays in touch.

Thank you for asking about Mom after she divorced Dad. Thank you for welcoming her back into your lives. And thank you for loving, embracing and accepting Toni as Dad's wife and your daughter.

Thank you for growing raspberries and tomatoes and zucchini and chard all the way until the last year of your life.

Thank you for splitting a beer with me and toasting with "Here's mud in your eye!" I loved your sense of humor. "Come back again some time when you won't stay as long," you joked as we said goodbye after a visit. I used to write down some of the funnier things you said such as "Where do you get your hair cut? On top of my head." I adored your happy laugh.

Thank you for not holding a grudge when we disagreed about social issues.

Thank you for listening to me.

Most of all, thank you for your unconditional love. It was important to me growing up and it remains a spirit transforming presence in my life today.

You were a cop (I love that photograph of you on a motorcycle in the 1930s) and a master plumber and an all-around handy man. Best of all for me, you were my grandfather.

I am loving you and remembering you. Happy 101st birthday!


Here's Grandpa holding my nephew, Adler, in the back yard. At Grandpa's funeral Adler and I looked at Grandpa in his casket and when I asked four year old Adler who that was, he said, "He looks like John Kerry." I laughed at my Grandpa's funeral as well as cried.

In honor of my Grandfather who would have been 101 years old today. He died in July, 2004 at the age of 97.