2008-05-01 My Grandpa

Today would have been my grandpa's 78th birthday, if he hadn't died in 1999. So I'm going to write a bit about him. (It's not the one with the glass eye, by the way.) I'm not going into details about how I gave him an awfully hard time when I reached puberty, or how he died of lung cancer. Instead, I'm going to share an anecdote of how he made a friend. Unlike me, my grandpa easily made friends. He really enjoyed communicating with people.

Once we were in a restaurant with the whole family. On the way out, when we were just putting on our jackets, he was suddenly gone. It turned out that he went into the kitchen to tell the cook that he really enjoyed his dinner.

Another time, it must have been before I was born, he found an address book in a restaurant. What would you do in that case? What would everybody do? Give it to the waiter, right? That's what he did. Eventually. But not before he had written his own name, address and telephone number neatly inside.
A couple of days later, my grandparents received a postcard (or was it a phone call?) from the owner of the address book, who turned out to be a female student. They became pen pals and started visiting each other regularly for more than twenty years. I remember getting a great toy airplane when she came to visit my grandparents with her fiancé. And they even came all the way to his funeral.

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Now that I've written that down, I cannot help but see some obvious parallels to my own life. If he was born 50 years later, my grandpa would have been one hell of a blogger.