Bob

My phone rang this morning in the dark, early hours. It was my mom. My grandpa is gone. He made it through so much, but I think the dawning awareness of the difficult road ahead of him convinced him to go Home instead.
Before my brothers and I were old enough to understand the significance of last names, having two men in our life named Grandpa meant that we'd have to somehow create a way to distinguish between them. So, my mom's dad came to be known to us as The Funny Grandpa. And so he was. White-haired since I can remember, this wiry guy with a pipe and a naughty smile made us giggle till we turned pink in the cheeks. He had a silly voice he'd use when he played with us and a cartoonish, wheezy "hee hee hee" that makes me laugh just to think of it.
My grandpa, Robert Louis Trinklein, was the son of a Lutheran minister who died when he was only 41, leaving 15-year-old Bob and his three younger siblings in the care of only their mother. But "only" is a sorely inadequate word to describe this woman. She was tough, she cheated her own great-grandchildren at dominoes (not that I'm sore about that), and she passed down to my grandpa her propensity for saying shocking things out loud. One never really could be sure what would come out of his mouth when it opened. Some of us awaited his commentary with glee and some of us preemptively winced. My sainted grandma could often be heard admonishing him - "Bob!" and "Robert!" if it was really bad. If you ever did meet my grandpa, you certainly would remember it. Everyone who knew him has a story to tell about him.
He was a brilliant ceramics engineer who melted his own sneakers by sitting too close to the campfire - while they were still on his feet. He was an inventor who didn't think twice about smoking his pipe while pumping gas into his vehicle. He was an avid golfer and was famous for his morning exercise routine. He had a raucous laugh and he loved for his children and grandchildren to cause trouble, relishing in re-telling the tales of their mischief to anyone who'd listen. He smelled like Listerine and vanilla tobacco.

He was a riot.

He was so animated that it sometimes made the young, shy, reserved me a little uncomfortable. I remember walking in the woods behind their house and getting slapped near my eye with a tree branch. He violently snapped the branch off the tree and gave it an over-the-top scolding for hurting his Christy. I was not really sure if all of that fuss had been necessary, a simple "oh-are-you-okay?" would have done the trick. But that wasn't his style.
When my brother Jon and I were small, we went camping with them and pitched our tent in the dark. In the middle of the night, we discovered why such a prime campsite was still empty so late in the day when a train came roaring down the tracks, just on the other side of the bushes from our tent!
Somehow, adventure followed my grandpa everywhere. Or maybe he just caused adventure to happen wherever he went. I can never be sure.
We usually spent a week or two of our summer with Grandpa and Grandma in Arkansas. Our days there were full of ice cream socials at church, swimming at the community pool, fishing, fireworks and the annual 4th of July parade - all the good things that childhood memories are made of.
The amazing thing, though, is the role he's played in the lives of my own children. Not many are blessed to know their great-grandfather. And not only to know him, but to know him as an active and involved person in their lives. Since great-grandpa is a mouthful to say and we had so many grandpas in our lives, my grandpa and grandma wanted a unique name for my children to call them. We settled on G-ma and G-pa. G-pa came to recitals and concerts and birthday parties. Andrew and Emma sat on his lap in his recliner, talking about the deep mysteries of childhood and they knew he was so proud of them. He loved for Andrew to tell him jokes, and gave him the same silly "hee hee hee" that I remembered from my childhood. Before Emma could even write, she would scribble lines on tiny scraps of paper, fold them and hand them to her G-pa, telling him they were "secret notes." He kept them in a box by his chair and when she'd visit, he'd pull them out and whisper their secrets back to her, "reading" the notes straight from his own imagination.
My children will miss him nearly as much as I will.
Several years ago, I passed out journals with questions in them to the grandparents in our lives. I asked them to fill them out at their leisure, giving us a tangible piece of their experience to pass down to our children. Not all of our grandparents were willing to play along in this exercise, but my Funny Grandpa did. I pulled out the journal this afternoon and have been paging through it. Question number 44 was, "Is there anything that you have learned in life that you really wish you knew when you were young?" And here is my grandpa's answer:
"What I have learned in life is that the only way to be content is to reflect on God's blessings."
He has been the same for as long as I can remember - his hair, his face, his habits unchanging. In a way, I guess I thought he was immortal. Or as much so as a person can be. Tonight, even though I am deeply sad, I choose to reflect on the blessing of having had this unforgettable character in my life, in my heritage. I am blessed to know that he is with his beloved Jesus and in that truth, I can't help but be content.