Long Time Gone

I always figured I was cool  because my grandfather was born in the early 1870s and how many people get to say that?  His father died when he was 12, his mother soon after. Just before then he wrote in his diary about how hard it was to bring his pal the cow to be butchered and how, when the Great Blizzard of '88 came, the snow piled up past the second-story windows. Later he was lucky enough to get to college and law school, he the child of a woman who couldn't read or write English - Gaelic was her tongue. This picture shows how he looked when he fell in love with my grandmother Carrie, poor dead girl, in the cemetery these 100 years. He's the one on the right,with his hands on her doomed and mortal head.I'm haunted by his story I think because I knew him. I lived in his house. He called me Blackberry Top for the shiny dark riot of my curls. He was a great believer in reaching across racial and ethnic barriers. The Boston Irish called him a turncoat because he opposed the Curley machine and sided with the Protestants when it came to good government. He was a judge and the Chairman of the Boston School Committee and a lot of other things too, but in his mind the best thing he ever did was get the teachers the pay raise they so deserved.A handsomer man there never was when young but even as when he was old with white hair he was lovely.I didn't have a father for five minutes of my young life but still I was happy, because I had him.His birthday was yesterday and I thought of him all day.