About three days after my grandfather died I had a dream. I had been invited to this huge gathering and once I arrived I found myself wandering around an enormous banquet facility unable to recognize anyone. I knew I’d been invited, I just felt utterly out of my element in such a huge place, and although there were scads of people around, I was alone. Finally my frustration won out, and I left the building by a back entrance. But rather than finding parking lots filled with cars, I wandered out into a nearby field, and up into the bordering woods. I hiked for a while, looking back periodically to the building I’d vacated, wondering how I’d got myself into such an odd predicament. Suddenly another hiker a young man in his mid-twenties climbed up to my vantage point and approached me as if we were friends.
“Why aren’t you at my dinner party, hon?” he asked, with a soft accent and manner that I immediately found familiar, although I couldnt connect the face. He seemed to be talking to me as if he were an older man and I was his his granddaughter.
“Oh, wow, I didn’t recognize you,” I stuttered with some amazement. “You’re you’re young.” It was my grandfather.
He laughed quietly and put his arm around me. “Well of course I am,” he agreed, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“I don’t want to go back,” I told him. “I didn’t recognize all those people. That place is too big. I just wanted to see you. I wanted to talk to you,” I told him.
And so he sat and talked softly with me there in the woods, missing his own banquet.
And that was the last time I ever saw my grandfather. But I am so grateful to him for seeking me out and spending time with me. I have the sense that I could talk to him if I wanted to, but things seemed settled and comfortable between us now, like a familiar and well-loved quilt.
My paternal grandmother and grandfather in the late 1930′s or early 1940′s.
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