Gramps

I got an email from my little sister in Texas:

Hi everyone,
I just saw today's date and remembered that it was 10 years ago today that Gramps died. I just can't believe it has been that long:

Hope everyone is doing ok. Got to go I should be doing my homework.

Gramps is our maternal grandfather, aka my mom's dad.

I remembered that it happened at this time of year. I also remember I found out about it a few days before I was supposed to give a communion talk in front of church. I wound up revising what I was going to say because of it.

When I was three years old, I had a hernia, and it gave me a distended stomach (it was "pooching out"). Mom and Dad would often take me and my sister to the fire house where Gramps worked. I enjoyed trying on the fireman's clothes and sitting in the driver's seat of the fire truck. I have a picture of me that was taken from back then.

I felt proud of my distended tummy because I looked like my Grandpa.

In the years before he died, he took to wearing a "beret"-type hat, which he caled his "Go to hell!" hat. He also wore a white beard. People thought he resembled Ernest Hemingway.

After he'd died I got to see a bunch of pictures of him from when he was younger. Most of my aunts and uncles had never seen them either. There was one picture of him at three years old. This must have been in the early 1920s. I remember seeing the wedding picture of him and Grandma - what a beautiful couple!

Grandma died in 1975, when I was five years old. I don't remember a lot about her, but the memories I do have are fond. I may talk about her some other time.