Grandpa

Grandpa had a gift for just being with you, and that meant a lot to me. He had all the time in the world. He didn’t have any kind of busy agenda or anything. He had nowhere else to be, nothing else to do. He’d tag along with you wherever you were going or just pull up a chair and sit next to you, and you knew he wasn’t just killing time or anxious to get on to the next thing; he was where he wanted to be. He didn’t even have to say much. Him just sitting there next to you communicated so much. Whenever he would come to Florida to visit, he’d go places with me. I took him to theatre classes at college; I remember he got a big kick out of the way my theatre professor Mark bantered with his students; Mark could cut you down so ruthlessly that it was funny and it made Grandpa laugh and laugh! I took him to church. I even took him to rehearsal for one of my plays at the Shakespeare Festival. The acoustics in the rehearsal hall were terrible, so Grandpa couldn’t hear much, but he sat and watched for an hour or more. Every time I took Grandpa to the theatre, my theatre friends just ate him up. They liked him a lot. And he liked them too. It meant so much to me that he would even want to enter my world, not to make any comment on it or to try to change it or improve it, just to be there. It meant a lot to me that he wanted to tag along with me. It made me feel loved. I love you, too, Grandpa. I’m going to miss you a lot.

-Mindy