Every year it’s the same thing. April 1 rolls around and I
think of my grandfather, my mother’s father. April Fools Day was his birthday.
If he were alive today, he would be 126 years old.
There are people in your life who play a role as savior. I’m
a firm believer in the adage that you make your own chances. Some people may
have certain advantages in terms of wealth that leads to an access to a
first-rate education, or more important, contact with those who are blessed
with insight and compassion, those who help shape the people we become.
In each and every case, though, it’s the individual whose
actions yield the exceptional. At the end of the day, we look at ourselves in
the mirror and there is only one person who looks back.
Then there are people like my grandfather. William Samuel
Neath lived with us for three years. In a small room off the front door of my
Aunt Gloria’s house that we were renting in the early 1960s. He was old and
feeble then and I was a mere boy, sensitive and quiet. He did little more than
lounge in his LazyBoy and smoke a pipe. For breakfast he drank tea and ate an
orange that he’d first roll with the flat of his hand to better encourage the
juice to flow from what counted for bulk citrus in Owen Sound, Ontario, in
1962.
On April Fools Day, Grampa would have me trace the scar
from a wound he received in the Great War. Bone fragments had lodged in his
forearm, and when I’d do as I was told and press the hard lump, his arm sprung
up in mock salute and we’d laugh and laugh.
That thought always makes me smile. He is gone all these
years, but in the days leading up to April Fools, I always pause to think of
him. On that single day I convince myself that he too is looking back at me in
the mirror, I resemble him now as much as I remember him then.
Next: Running for Your Life: C’mon in to The Jazz Palace !!
