From journals and memory. Fred Powers Heald — “Gramp.”
Gramp was a paleontologist, a doctor, a man who spent time in India during the war and came back with a British manner and a collection of bones. He had multiple hobbies the way other men have one. The display shelf in his house had artifacts from several different careers — fossils, medical school specimens, items from places he’d been.
He was cheerful. That’s the word I keep coming back to. Genuinely cheerful, not performatively so. He’d looked at a lot of the hard parts of life and remained cheerful about it. He worked in medicine before most of the tools existed. He dug up bones. He kept a petrified walrus penis in the back of the bedroom closet for reasons he never fully explained.
When he moved to a care facility, he called my Dad to warn about the walrus penis, not wanting it to be discovered unexpectedly.
He lived long enough that I got to know him as an adult, which is a gift. Kids know their grandparents as authority figures or as warmth. Adults can see them as people. Gramp, seen as a person, was someone who had built a coherent and interesting life out of a lot of different interests, who had taken care of family members with special needs into his and Gram's old age, who had done a lot of things well and wore it lightly.
I got a skull from his medical school years. He got to keep the walrus penis.