The absent grandfather

According to my mom and several other relatives, Anna has inherited physical traits from my maternal grandfather's family -- the Abbatecolas. She went as far to compare Anna, just a few weeks old, to my great uncle Vinnie.

I only met my Uncle Vinnie one time that I can remember and that was about 20 years ago. But based on that experience, I have to say that I don't think the 75 year old Italian man I met back in 1988 and my young daughter look much alike.

The issue is compounded by the fact that I never knew my grandfather on that side, Frank. He died 12 years before I was born. In a way it's even odd to call him my grandfather. He is long gone. I imagine that if I took the parts of my uncles Frank, Joe, and Bob that don't remind me of grandma and rolled them all together, it would sort of be like my grandfather. But even as a child, I had no idea that certain things in my grandmother's house might have belonged to him -- his chair, his wallet, his old glasses, et cetera. He was out of the picture, some place faraway, in heaven perhaps?

And yet at the same time he wasn't. He touched all of us in different ways. For one, he had an artistic side. There are some really great sketches he did of my mother as a baby. He did them from photographs, but still, let's just say that I can't draw like that and perhaps never will be able to draw like that. It's kind of funny that all of his children are artistic too, and grandchildren even. Most of them gravitated to the visual arts. There is certainly some kind of artistic residue in the blood. Other forces may have been at play, but natural talent is hard to synthesize.

For me, the weird things about this absent grandfather were quite personal. That is because in some odd ways I physically resembled this person in the photographs. Marta and I used to pass a photo of him in the dining room in my parents' house and Marta would often point at him and say, "Look, Issi, that's you!"

Other strange links would pop up from time to time. I liked to sleep with my knees up sometimes when I was younger. One time I was discussing this and my Aunt Mary chimed in and said that "Daddy used to do that." Mary, who was 12 when he died, usually refers to him as "Daddy" while Mom, then aged 19, calls him "my father."

More recently I was putting the heat of a freshly poured cup of coffee up against my closed eye lids one morning at my parents' house. I do this because when I wake up, my eyes are often full of crap you just can't get out by washing your face. The heat helps to melt the goop. It also feels pretty good. "Do that again," my Mom said suddenly. "Now ask me why I told you to do that", she continued. "Why?" I asked. "Because," she said, "my father used to do that every morning at the breakfast table."

One final thing I have picked up from the absent grandfather is, believe it or not, how to cut my pancakes. When I was boy I shared a few breakfasts with my Uncle Bob -- maybe he was still living at grandma's house then, I don't remember. Anyway, Uncle Bob used to cut his pancakes into a neat grid before eating them. Some people prefer to cut and eat, piece by piece. So I learned to eat pancakes from Uncle Bob.

One time I did this in front of grandma, and she stopped suddenly. "You know," she said. "You cut your pancakes just like your grandfather." I guess Uncle Bob learned this trick at the breakfast table too!