Then he turned around and marched up the stairs.
Nobody’s old in heaven...
That statement got me thinking. Sometime later, I called my mom in
Ulysses. “Hey, do you have pictures of Pop when he was a young man?”
“I’m sure I do,” she said. “I’ll have to hunt them down, though. Do you
want me to mail them to you?”
“No, I wouldn’t want them to get lost. Just make a copy of one and mail
that.”
Several weeks passed. Then one day, I opened the mailbox to find an
envelope from Mom containing a Xerox copy of an old black-and-white
photograph. I learned later that Mom had dug it out of a box that she’d
stored in a back bedroom closet since the time Cassie was a baby, a box
that hadn’t seen daylight since two years before Colton was born.
There were four people in the picture, and Mom had written an
accompanying note explaining who they were: My Grandma Ellen, in her
twenties in the photo, but now in her eighties and still living in Ulysses. My
family had last seen her just a couple of months before. The photo also
showed my mom as a baby girl, about eighteen months old; my Uncle Bill,
who was about six; and Pop, a handsome fellow, twenty-nine years young
when the photo was snapped in 1943.
Of course, I’d never told Colton that it was bugging me that he didn’t
seem to recognize Pop from my old keepsake photo. That evening, Sonja
and I were sitting in the front room when I called Colton to come upstairs. It
took him a while to make his appearance, and when he did, I pulled out the
photocopied picture Mom had sent.
“Hey, come here and take a look at this, Colton,” I said, holding the
paper out for him. “What do you think?”
He took the picture from my hand, looked down, and then looked back at
me, eyes full of surprise. “Hey!” he said happily. “How did you get a picture
of Pop?”
Sonja and I looked at each other, astonished.
“Colton, don’t you recognize anyone else in the picture?” I said.
He shook his head slowly. “No.. .”
I leaned over and pointed to my grandma. “Who do you think that is?”