The events about my grandfather’s childhood were relayed to me by my father sometime in my teenage/young adult life. My paternal grandfather was an interesting guy. He was a devout Christian, worshipping in Southern Baptist Churches for most of his life. Towards the end of his life, my grandfather would read the bible three times a year, looking at a different translation every cycle. My grandfather prided on knowledge; he often told my cousins and me never to take education for granted and never to stop learning. He always reminded us that he never had any higher education or even finished high school, but that education was important. It’s funny.
Now that I remember this, I realize that this must be where I got my love for studying and understanding the world around me. One of my popular sayings, “Everything happens for a reason; nothing is random,” stems from this idea as I have always believed that even choices we deem as random are still based on our outcomes. Think about it for a second; right now, pick a random number between 1-10. What number did you pick? Was it 7? I bet some people were a little startled. I don’t know what you picked, but logic dictates that many picked 7. But even if you didn’t pick 7, the number you picked wasn’t random. Don’t believe me? Think about it for a second: if you picked 2, did you pick it because you like even numbers, or did you pick it because it was special to you? I once asked a student why he picked two, and they said it was because there were two fingers in the peace sign, and they liked it. But that shows that nothing is ever (or at least rarely) done randomly.
My grandfather was also an avid player of cards and chess. He loved both games. At an early age, my grandfather taught all of us how to play games like rummy and solitaire. Later in life, he taught me how to play poker, but he did this for a reason. You see, my grandfather was good at counting cards. He let me play a few hands, win, and build my confidence. Then he would set in and let me lose hand after hand. We would play with cheerios as poker chips, and after he took all my cheerios, he would look at me and say, “Now, Omega, now that you lost all of your money, how are you going to pay for food for your family?” That was my grandfather, always attempting to teach us some life lessons through all his actions.
Chess was by far the thing that I loved to play with my grandfather the most. My grandfather had this strategy where he would somehow get into your back row with his rook and then start taking out all the essential pieces before you could move them. He played with all my cousins, few of them ever beat him. I was one of the lucky few who beat him; I beat him on four separate occasions. I remember the first time he exclaimed, “He beat me!” My father replied, “Yeah, Dad, he thinks like that, always a few steps ahead; it makes sense that he beat you eventually.” I played chess with him almost every time I went to his house.
My grandfather was the best; even my friends considered him their grandfather. It was amusing; I had to convince one of them once that he was, in fact, my actual grandfather and not just the figurative grandfather that they all thought they had. He used to wear crazy ties; I remember that in my teenage years, we had a scavenger hunt, and one of the things we had to do was go to my grandfather’s house and get the craziest tie we could find. When I got there, I think he acquired 40 or 50 ties over the years. When he died, all his children and grandchildren wore one of his ties to his funeral; mine was yellow with the Tasmanian devil. He also had these different handshakes that he would do with me and my friends. I was unsure if they were real handshakes, but they were funny.
He was also an expert at knot-tying. I know that sounds like a weird skill, but it’s something he learned when he was in the army. He used to go to different schools during the day when he was retired, show students how to tie various knots and talk about his experience. He once told me that the only knot he refuses to teach is the forbidden knot. I asked him later in life what that knot was, and he said it was the knot that created a noose. He never wanted to be responsible for a person ending their own life. That was probably for the best, given future events, so he kept it to himself.
So, why bring up my grandfather? This chapter is called before my birth, after all, and so far, I’ve only talked about things that happened while I was alive. Something that I learned from my father in the time after my grandfather died was that my grandfather was emotionally abused by my great-grandfather when he was a kid. Despite this, my grandfather would still take his children to see their grandfather because he still believes that a grandfather should have a relationship with his grandchildren. My great-grandfather’s emotional abuse stemmed back to the death of my great-grandmother, my grandfather’s mother.
When my great-grandmother died, my grandfather, who was a young child at the time, was inconsolable for weeks. All he did was cry while his aunts watched over him. He was like this until one day, a mist came through the windows of his house. It settled onto my grandfather and covered him completely. According to the story, when it finally dissipated, my grandfather wiped his eyes, stood up from his bed, and never cried again.
My grandfather knew things, but he never told us. But of the things he told us, they would affect my life. He told my father that he thought of himself as like Issac from the bible. Issac was the son of Abraham in Genesis, who was the father of the Jewish people. Issac was a second son, and it becomes an important lesson that it wasn’t necessarily the first choice but God’s choice in the person to whom he would carry his promise. Like Issac, he believed his second son would bring something important to the world. Three guesses as to who his second son was.
One final thing about my grandfather: He used to pray in his sleep. If you find this hard to wrap your mind around, think about a person talking in their sleep; except for him, they were prayers. What he prayed about, I am unsure; all I know is that he prayed for other people. That’s what my grandfather did. He always thought of everyone other than himself.
In 2012, my grandfather went into hospice care. My cousin would act as his nurse. A few days later, he would die in his living room. According to my father, strange things happen leading up to his death—stuff like electrical issues, light flickering, and odd sounds around the house. The night my grandfather died, my father woke up to the sound of someone saying weeee, as a child would who was on a swing or playground equipment. When my father heard this, he ran down the stairs and found that my grandfather had just passed. It has always been my father’s thought that what he heard that day was Yeshua taking my grandfather to heaven and my grandfather reacting in child-like wonder.
I miss my grandfather every day.
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