Missing my grandfather

Boxes and files of family information haunt me. Digging through the albums and files, I find things that surprise and amaze me. If only we could go back in time and talk to our grandparents, now long gone. For many of us, our images and memories come from vague stories and photos seen on walls and in albums. But there is so much we can never know. What made them laugh? What did they like to eat? What were their dreams and hopes?

It is a shame that our interest in our grandparents comes to us when we are in the later years of our own experience. When we are young and at the beginning of our lives, we have little curiosity or patience with those who came before us. It is all about us. In fact, we are impatient with their old-fashioned ideas and convinced they can't understand what we may be thinking or planning to do with our own lives.

My maternal grandparents and my mother were all only children. My sister and I share the remaining memorabilia. When we begin to sort and organize, we find things that trigger memories and family lore. One intriguing document recently caught my eye — a carefully folded, crinkled, and yellowed seven-page document. It was typed, which looks odd in our current age of word processing. Removing the rusted paperclip, I read about my maternal grandfather, Earl Daniel Wise. It was a speech at his retirement that revealed many interesting facts about his life.

Growing up, when we visited my grandparents, he had little patience with his two visiting granddaughters. Busy little girls were a bit strange in his usually ordered world. He liked to play cards, watch wrestling, and watch baseball on television. As a child, I would go into his room and look at the shiny black and white photos of him holding up huge fish, caught in the Northwest. He smiled in those pictures taken a long time ago, but my memories aren't of him smiling, especially after my grandmother died.

The quiet grandfather of my memories came alive to me in the words as I read. Who would have thought this quiet old man, who sat for hours in his special chair, staring at a blinking television, could have led such an adventurous life?

I learned he left home at 16 and at one point answered the call to help build the Panama Canal. He traveled to Galveston, Texas, where he would catch a ship to start his great adventure. He took one look at the men returning with malaria and yellow fever, and he tore up his contract.

His life included a variety of experiences, including jobs in New York City, Maine, the Midwest, and finally the West Coast. He even played football in college. It turns out this bright, highly successful executive with Pacific Bell Telephone took time for adventure. He was drawn to the deserts of California to look for gold. He went three times, and each time returned empty-handed. He finally focused on his lifelong career with the telephone company. I wish I could ask him about those months in the desert. He answered the call and served in the army during World War I as a lieutenant using his experience in communications to work with the Army Signal Corps.

The adventures didn't end for my grandparents as their retirement years approached. They accepted an opportunity in Istanbul, Turkey. They sold their house and left to live in a primitive country, my grandfather charged with helping the Turkish government modernize its archaic and inefficient telephone service. They used their years abroad to travel. One of my favorite old photos shows the couple atop a pair of camels.

Glimpses into my grandparents’ lives make me wish I could ask them questions about their adventures and share some of mine. It would be so interesting to hear about when people used typewriters and went looking for gold in the deserts of California.