Peanut Butter Ghosts

My youngest daughter will never know her grandfather, a blessing my oldest children were graced with and enjoyed. He doted on them to an extent they didn’t realize. Likely to an extent that I didn’t know since my mother and he spoke far more in depth about it than I would ever know.

As fathers, one of the toughest things we have to deal with in our lives and in the lives of our children is death. Deaths of grandparents and deaths of pets and, sadly, sometimes worse than that. I had to deliver the news to my oldest daughters and to this day it was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. In the song of life, it is always those final notes that hit us the hardest.

Difficult a subject as it may be to discuss those that have passed on we want our children to know our parents. And I want her to know my father. Undoubtedly, as she ages, she’ll see the photos and albums and videos of him, and the framework of who he was will be established, but filling in that framework is the duty of not just me, but his mother, my mother, sisters, brothers, friends and family.

So, on the anniversary of my dad’s passing, it has been troubling me and causing a lot of pondering as to how I pass along that knowledge to her, how she will ever know my father, who he was, what he was and get a sense of the man that shaped my life so. Undoubtedly through stories and the photos and hearing others speak in passing will give her ideas. But those are cursory glances and don’t connect us in any meaningful way. In truth, this has been a struggle of mine since she was born. A piece that felt missing since her arrival in this world and one of the few moments of pain, for me, at her birth.

Then, tonight, I realized that I don’t have to think on it that hard at all. As with many things we can overthink them to the point of futility and arrive at no better answer than when we started. I got lucky on this one. Or perhaps I had some prodding from the beyond. That would be my dad’s way. He was one to nudge me rather than just show me the way.

I could, in conceit, say that she’ll know him through me and who I am, though I will be the first to tell you I am a poor imitation of my father. For sure I can’t help but take away his mannerisms and behaviors because, as a boy, I spent years mimicking them and trying to become the man who I admired most in this world. To be sure, that will be a part of it, small though it may be.

For example, I barely knew my father’s father, my Papa. I was very young when he passed and though we were parted far too soon faint reminders of him float through my life a grab me at the strangest times. The smell of peanut butter and Ritz crackers is one of them. It never fails to transport me instantly back in time to the days he held me on his lap eating. Good times, tImes that were robbed of my youngest by the hands of fate and the cruelty of time.

Thinking back to those times though, when I was a boy and I’d do something or say something and my dad would get this faraway look in his eyes and say, ‘That’s something your grandfather would say/do’, and it would, for me, create an instant connection to a man I barely knew. I have my grandfather’s knives (he whittled) and pens (he loved calligraphy) and cameras (10 out 11 of my baby pics are from him). And though he never showed me how to use any of them, I’d whittle with those knives as a boy, I’d play with the cameras, and I’d (try) to write with the pens. For all my inability to use them, it resulted in me knowing him better. It connected us. Generations and realms apart and connected by the simplest of things. All because i knew that person was important to a person that I loved and admired.

To this day, I have some of Papa’s stuff, and I pull the out now and again and they’ve become priceless to me. And so interwoven are the stories and imagined meetings now that I’m not sure where the reality of it all stopped and my imagination took over. And the reality of it is that it doesn’t matter. Because reality or not, memory or the imagination of a young boy, I knew the man. What I missed out on I constructed and connected in my head and that’s just as real as any memory.

And through this reminiscing I’ve realized how wrong I truly am. My youngest daughter will know my father. Not through who I am, but through who he was to me, to my mother, to my wife and others. Her little mind, like mine, will make those connections and establish that bond to a man she never really met, but will know him all the same. You see, I don’t really know if I remember that smell of Ritz and peanut butter crackers or if I linked the two through stories told to me by my dad and mom and my grandmother. The line between reality and fiction, memory and wish are so blurred as to be indistinguishable. And irrelevant. But that love that others had for the man created a bridge for me to cross and build memories of the man that last to this day. I don’t know what was real and what was created by my desire to know him. And I don’t care.

So, though they’ll never meet, I have zero doubts that she will know him. If for no other reason than how important he was to the main people in her life right now. She’ll get stories , stories filled with love and wonder and laughter and memories from the hearts of those that surround he. She’ll get bits and pieces from Dad and Mom, brother and Nanny. An invariably those connections will grow in her mind and create the same sense of the man as was created for me in my Papa……….and it makes me…….happy.

And one of the reasons for that happiness is nothing less than my dad’s modesty. I can picture him throwing this off as some sort of nonsense and saying how silly it would be to think people still thought of him that much.

But, secretly, if you knew him like I did, like we did, you’d also know he’d get a real kick out of it.