Happy birthday, Pop Pop!
Today is my father’s father’s 90th birthday. Lindsay and I returned from DC this morning after a very, very large party yesterday at my dad’s house, featuring Pop Pop and about 60 descendants. We had lots of barbecue. We finished the beer. We introduced Lindsay to people she didn’t expect to be related to.
One person, though, who we sorely missed was my late grandma Nina. In her life, she set a high example for love of family and community, for how to be charitable, for what it meant to be Catholic even.
Most religions—but especially Catholic and Orthodox Christianity—place a strong emphasis on hagiography: of honoring great lives through words and imagery. My father’s family traditionally hasn’t been one for speeches, which makes honoring a great life hard even at a 90th birthday party, but the Scot-Irish in us wants to tell stories, so we end up doing everything obliquely. For example, the family yesterday made a scrapbook. Lindsay, who never got a chance to meet my grandmother, and I managed to design the final page. So we printed out this photo for Pop Pop…
…of me as a toddler with my grandmother. And I had Lindsay write, in her eminently lovely handwriting, “We’re so lucky to have so many great ladies in our lives.”
So Pop Pop: happy birthday. We miss her too.
