Thank You Grandpa

Keith Glenn Walker, 1894-1980

We were not sure what to think of you.  We really didn't --

• You were a shutterbug and took thousands of pictures of us and yourself, and the places you visited;
• You gave away to us ten times as many photographic prints as you kept even when we didn't ask for them;
• You always wrote the names and dates and sometimes places on the back of the pictures you kept;
• You wrote the names and dates and sometimes places on the backs of the photographic prints you gave to us;
• You wrote thousands of letters to your hundreds of relatives, even distant cousins; 
• You kept all the the letters from family you received, writing on the outside of the envelopes some form of identification of the person who sent it to you, "Beulah's daughter" or "my cousin" or whatever;
• You kept in a huge envelope every scrap of paper with a name and/or address and/or phone number and/or birthdate of a relative on it; 
• In your retirement, you traveled the country six months out of the year visiting relatives, talking to us, telling us about our family if we would listen; 
• And you kept taking more pictures of us

-- We didn't understand you.  You were sort of queer to do all that, not like everyone else at all who just ignore it.

But now, thirty-six years after you are gone, I get it.  You were wise beyond what we understood.  

Thank you.


Copyright © 2016 by Kevin W. Walker