Family is chosen. I’m not speaking only of those people genetically unrelated yet so connected you choose them as brothers and sisters, or friends who become so close you cannot imagine a future or past without them. All family is chosen.
How many blood relatives do you truly enjoy spending time with? How many do you reach out to and lift up not because you feel obligated, but because you honestly want to help them? How many are you close to through the relationship you have jointly built rather than your physical proximity or shared history beneath a common roof? How many do you absolutely know, for certain, love you for you, rather than because you are “family”? You choose your true family, and their genetic similarity to you, whether like or unlike, is unimportant.
Jack Williams, my grandfather, chose me.
I believe he was around 18 in this image from 01939, which he told me was from his high school graduation. His hair went white early and I’m not certain he ever again wore a suit, but those eyes are the same ones he looked out at 02010 with, almost 90 years old.
He taught me how to swim. How to ride a bike. How to shoot. How to use a slide rule and how to survey with a plumb-line. How to drive a car, a pickup, a dump truck, a tractor, a backhoe, a bulldozer. To always hold doors for women and to be courteous to everyone. For all he looked down on science fiction as “space junk”, he taught me it was okay to have crazy ideas, and, if you worked hard, you could make your crazy ideas happen. He instilled a love of reading in me, and taught me it was good to learn. “Learn anything and everything, boy, because you never know when it will come in handy.” He was so right. Self-reliance is a trait I also gained from him, but I wouldn’t be a tenth as capable were it not for my omnivorous reading.
Reading, learning and, most of all, doing were my grandfather’s great gifts to me. Ideas are important but action is what makes things happen. He learned this firsthand as an engineer in World War II, blowing up infrastructure only to rebuild it once battles were won. In his own words, “it was a terrible time and a wonderful time”. It was during the war he gained so much of the knowledge and drive to do and to accomplish he would put to good use afterward in his own endeavors. The man could make anything from raw materials. Roads, houses, giant buildings, farming machines, irrigation systems, guns, cannons, trebuchets, lakes. If he wanted to make it, he figured out how to do it and it was made.
He wasn’t perfect. He had a racist disposition socially ingrained through his upbringing, the era and location of his youth. This thankfully softened with age. He had decidedly unmodern ideas about the place of women in the work force, and was incredibly proud my grandmother “never worked a day in her life”. He was good at pushing people away, and had trouble making friends and keeping them, breaking long-time connections over imagined or unworthy slights. All he really wanted was confirmation of his importance to someone, but he could never tell them this. Until much later in his life, he had a hard time showing emotions or saying “I love you”. He could be stubborn as hell, immovable, and it was damned near impossible for him to apologize. He made plenty of mistakes raising his own kids, some of which, to his great credit, he learned from and didn’t repeat with me.
I remember riding along in the boom seat of his backhoe when I was small, probably 6 or 7. Looking at the boom arm, I began thinking about all the amazing things the giant claw swinging on the end could find in the earth. Forgotten treasure, tunnels to secret, subterranean worlds, tyrannosaurus rex skeletons, crash landed spaceships. I told him I thought we might find these things and he told me I was right, you never knew what was going to be pulled from the ground. Later the same summer, I remember my grandfather leaping from the boom seat where he’d been digging a trench for a water line and running excitedly over to the giant mound of dirt he’d been piling up. Reaching down, he pulled something dark and pointed from the side of the pile. In his large, rough hand was a Native American spearhead, fully twice as long as my own child’s hand from wrist to middle fingertip. This uncovering of mystery from the earth we walked on every day left a lasting impression. These imagined secrets were real. I have looked at our world this way ever since.
I remember sitting in my grandparents’ kitchen, sipping tea and talking about the Pyramids. I was around 9, and we’d pore over books on ancient Egypt together, his engineer’s view informing me of all the intricate construction mysteries and mathematical precision built into these immense, stone wonders. Were they really tombs? Were they somehow observatories or clocks, charting the passage of time with starlight and sunbeam? Were they ritual entrances to the Egyptian Land of the Dead? He didn’t know. No-one knew for sure. But he wanted to know how they managed to build with those huge blocks of stone so he could use their techniques in his own construction. For me, secrets were now no longer pieces of a time and place long gone, but useful, active principles to be uncovered, understood, brought back to life and used to create with here in our world.
I remember my grandparents’ clock on the living room mantel. For most of my childhood, it struck a Westminster chime on the quarter hours, interspersed with mechanical sounds of springs and gearing. The room I slept in when I lived with my grandparents shared a wall with this clock, and I would lie awake at night, turning this melody and those sounds over and over in my mind, spinning out counterpoint melody and companion rhythms. I developed a repertoire of these small tunes in my head, and eventually began singing them and tapping out accompanying rhythms on table tops, chair arms, my legs and belly, whatever was at hand. When I was 12, I was sitting with my grandparents at the lunch counter one hot summer day, eating cheese and crackers and drinking lemonade. The clock chimed on the noon hour and I launched out one of my little songs. As I laid a final flourish of fingernail taps on an icy drinking glass, my grandmother looked at me and said, “That was pretty good!” My grandfather, never one with a use for music in any way, paused a moment, smiled and then genuinely agreed. It was at that moment I became a musician. To this day, I have only to hear or imagine a Westminster chime and I’m right back in that same glorious summertime with my grandfather and grandmother.
All my youth he told me to “Go west, young man”. This directive eventually merged with the realization I would be much happier in the liberal zone of Northern California. I hurt him when I left the Midwest and through extended absences, but if I didn’t call often enough for his liking, he would call me. Sometimes he would call me even if I had called just a few days before, to talk again. It was rough when he began to decline in his last years and could no longer use the telephone or even his mediated captioning system. I had a difficult time watching this, knowing the end would come. Increasingly, I could not bear it, but told myself he had lived the life he wanted to live, taking care of his wife and himself until the last, stubbornly independent even as he lost his health and his clarity.
He was proud of me and he told me so. He could never stay angry and always forgave my weaknesses, came to terms with and overlooked my disappointing strangeness. He wanted only to see me successful and happy. I know he loved me unconditionally, and would have done anything for me it was in his power to do.
I would have liked to tell him how happy and proud I am he is my grandfather. I had already told him this on many occasions, but I would have liked to say it one last time. I would have liked to tell him how much I love him, and how I would likely not have lived to adulthood if he hadn’t chosen me. I would have liked to say thank you.
Our blood relatives denied me this last opportunity. And while it hurts, this hurt truly doesn’t matter. He knew, and I’m still here living a life he gave me. This can never be taken away. While my heart beats, what he set in motion can never be stopped. He’s alive in every step I take. My desire now is to live the life I want to, the greatest life I can, and to share this life with others in whatever form I may. I write this wearing one of his pine green work shirts – worn, torn, stained and marked from all the labor it saw. It still holds the secrets of earth, the warmth of summer, the sounds of a clock, the ambitions of a man. My materials differ and my tools are modern, yet, like my grandfather before me, I have much work to do now.
I’m sorry I wasn’t there to see you off, Pa-Paw. I think about you and I miss you every day, always have and always will. When I do get my hands on a working time machine, you’re my first destination. I’ll be looking forward to that day until it happens or for the rest of my life, whichever comes first.
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