(this is the first in a series of articles looking back at the year 2005, marked, for me, by three funerals, and a wedding.)

The New Year 2005 began for me at 5:00 am on the morning of January 1. My sister called me to tell us that my mother’s father had died. As I hung up the phone, I said, “Happy New Year to me.”

Grandpa Jack (said as one word, like “lumberjack”) had been sick for several years, so this wasn’t a shock. As I recall, for a few nights before the call, we had been wondering to ourselves, “Is this the night?”

It’s customary to look back at a deceased through a moral filter, not seeing the bad stuff and concentrating on the good stuff. That would be hard for me to do with Grandpa Jack, and, thankfully, I don’t have to focus on that. Instead, when I think of him, now, a year later, I’m confronted with memories, just little vignettes of experiences, places, and things.

I hate that my children did not get to know him as a well man. I hate that the younger of my siblings and cousins didn’t really get to experience that, either, not for any length of time, as Greg and I did. The man he was late in his life was just a fleeting shadow of the Grandpa Jack I knew as a young boy and as a young man, and as I choose to remember him.

For our first seven and nine years, respectively, Greg and I were his only grandchildren. I see, myself, as a young family starting out, how much you rely on your own parents those first few years (heh, still going on, for my wife and I), and we saw a lot of Grandpa Jack during those years. We wanted for nothing. Oh, how the memories return! I wish they could have known how it was, the specific thoughts that flood the mind, like:

• Fourths of July. I don’t have it straight in my head what we did as a young family for the Fourth as I was growing up, but my fondest memories of that midsummer night’s festivities are on Maple Street, having lunch of corn on the cob outside, and walking down the alley to watch the fireworks. Grandpa Jack would have some little cherry bombs in his shirt pocket, which he’d light and throw from time to time, just when we got comfortable again. I suppose you have to be in a certain age to find that amusing, and I remember it as such.

• there was nothing, NOTHING, like Christmas at Grandpa Jack’s and Grandma Norma’s. Always the last stop on our Christmas Day Tour, we would sometimes get home after midnight. There’d be presents of great height, width, and depth, usually just what we had wanted, knowing Santa didn’t necessarily have the means to deliver the stuff we really wanted, it would show up at Grandpa Jack’s. He, himself, turned in to an elf of impressive lightheartedness and silliness and energy. There was always ample to unwrap, and ample to eat. When my Aunt and Uncle began a family of their own, the place also got crowded and hot, but also increased in liveliness exponentially. No man enjoyed his grandchildren more, of that I am quite sure.

• The “Grandpa Jack Special:” a Champ from Fox’s Pizza, with everything. I still crave that thing.

• RC Cola.

• Grandpa Dollars

• The sacks of snacks he’d always bring to the house when he would visit.

• Riding in his 1971 Chevy Blazer

• The Norwegian Lady at Virginia Beach

• Birthdays, when he and his wife would show at the same time as my Grandmother (divorced from Grandpa Jack) and her husband. When I was young, I always expected something funny or strange or evil or scary to happen at those times, but, nothing ever did.

• those flat little discs of hamburger he would be proudly grilling at family reunions. Not too much by themselves, but he had grilled peppers and onions to go on them. Yum,

• My senior pictures. Grandpa Jack was, among other things, a fairly accomplished amateur photographer, so I commissioned him to take my informal senior pictures. To this day I am not allowed to divulge the location where those pictures were shot.

It isn’t hard at all to totally miss the Grandpa Jack of my youth, and it was very hard to see his health in a steady and relentless decline for so many years. While I understand that there’s no going back, and there’s no stopping what time and life does to each of us, it doesn’t stop me from missing those things, and remembering fondly those times.