In a desperate attempt to avoid the two inevitable in life, homework and the need to sleep, I cleaned the basement this evening. It had become unbearable.
Under a pile of Eriks socks I found a leather covered photo album. I love that album possibly more than most every other physical item. It's full of black and white photos from what I assume to be my grandparents photos from their early lives, most of the dated pictures are from around 1939. Many of them are framed in white and faded so much that the images and figures within the frame are almost invisible like the ghost many of the have become. I don't know who any of the people are, the handwriting on the backs is almost indistinguishable, and that which I can read has no meaning to me. They are pictures of people I will never meet. On the inside front cover is printed in elegant penmanship;

-To-
->.Mom & Dad.<-

- From - Your Son

->.Fred.<-

that's what makes it special to me. This was made by a man who I never knew and given to his parents. That man was my grandfather, and he is responsible for my life and my brothers life and my fathers life and he is a man I have never met. I always think about this, and that I wish I had the opportunity to meet him, to talk to him. During the Remembrance day assemblies I don't remember the men who died in war, I remember my grandfather. I pretend that I have fabulous memories, ones where I'm four and I'm sitting on his lap while he tells me a story, or that he is sitting at the head of the table while we have family dinners. I always wake up though, I always come back to reality and remember that he was not there, and when he was, or if he was it would not have been like that, he was probably a stiff or old man who disliked children and watched television all evening. But I wouldn't know, no one has told me, they tell me how great a man he was, and that he was a brilliant pilot and that he worked for the CPR in his old age, and that it was the shift work that killed him.

These are all I have, they are pictures of him, and of his life, or of life in general long before my parents, and long before me. There are pictures of men in uniforms going off to the war, and there are pictures of people in Banff, and at the Prince of Wales Hotel.

This has a wonderful note on the back;

It says:
Toddy, another
swell girl at the Bus
station, now up at
Banff; likes it too
according to her letters
but misses us. Also
vice-versa! Obviously.

My grandfather in the middle.

Ghosts on the bumper.

Ghost.

The past, things before us, are hard to make real and important. It's hard to say that the word war means nothing to me, but it really didn't, until I saw these pictures, these pictures of young men with guns and bayonets in their arms, dressed up proper to go off and fight. That's what makes it real, this is what I remember.