My Grandfather Isn’t My Guardian Angel After All

After admiring his photos, my dad’s stories shattered my image

I’m flipping through the scrapbook my grandfather’s sister gave my dad as a keepsake.

There’s my grandpa in his high school varsity jacket, looking suave.

There he is playing the trombone in some gymnasium in the remote North Dakota plains, the wind whistling outside as the girls fall over him.

There he is in an elementary school class photo, a cute kid with big ears. He’s freckled with dark hair and doesn’t look like either my dad or me.

Grandpa Gary died in a car accident in 1967 when my dad was seven years old.

How I long to have met him.

Some years ago I was visiting Gary’s sister, my great-aunt, at her summer cabin in Cooke City, Montana, two miles from the entrance gate of Yellowstone National Park.

“When my brother died,” she said, “I came here and just sat. I stared at the mountains and never wanted to go back to the world again.”

After long days of pleasant conversation — my great-aunt is a mensch — I slept in the loft upstairs. I lay awake squeezing tears from my eyes, yearning for my grandpa.

Normally I don’t believe in an afterlife, but during those hot nights in the loft in Cooke City, I came to believe that Gary was my guardian angel. He couldn’t be with me in the land of the living, so he embraced me from the realm of the dead.

“Come here to me,” I whispered. “Guide me. Protect me.”

I think my impulse to name Gary my guardian angel was driven by my deep need to connect with him. He should have been an old man by my grandmother’s side, regaling me with tales of his youth.

Instead, there was emptiness. My dad never talked about him.

I always wondered why.

Last night, my parents and I went out to dinner to celebrate my mom’s birthday. After a while, the conversation fell on the topic of our first memories.

I talked about how I was afraid I didn’t remember going to visit Bobby the Beaver in Duluth, Minnesota, a memory I thought was important to my parents.

“I should think not,” laughed my mom. “You weren’t even two.”

My mom’s first memory was building a house for her cats out of little golden books in the doorway of her kitchen.

My dad remembered scenes from his grandparent’s farm in North Dakota — looking out his window at the barn, playing on a ten-foot snowdrift, riding a horse led in a circle by his grandpa.

“And I remember the sound of my parents arguing,” he added. “Not their faces. Just the sound.”

Tread carefully, I thought. “What are your other memories of your dad?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just the arguing. I don’t even know if he came around after the divorce. I guess I should have asked Mom about that.”

I froze. No memories? At all?

My perception of Gary as a kindly young gentleman was shattered. Sure, my grandma was a firecracker, but how could he abandon her and that sweet young boy?

Was he immature? An asshole? Simply a deadbeat dad? I’ll never know.

I know one thing, though. He’s no longer my guardian angel.

Thanks for reading! Here’s more about my “memory” of Bobby the Beaver: