All you need know My grandfather, the lumberjack, was often mistaken for Paul Bunyan. When he yelled “timber” it could be heard from Seattle to Vancouver. Once he felled an ancient oak to teach me the lore of tree rings— wide for a good year, narrow for a bad. His calloused hands caressed the log as he said, “this is all you need know of life.” Grandpa, the watchmaker, was stooped and gray, but elegant as if he’d stepped out of a portrait from a forgotten time of formal grace. What Rodin would have given to marble the bones of his hands. I would sit on his workbench in a shop full of child-sized tools and watch him work and rework the movements of a timepiece. With a thousand pieces splayed before him he’d say, “Here I create time, and time is all you need know of life.” My grandfather, the farmer, had the finest two hundred acres in northeastern Kansas. A doughty man born without ear or rhythm he’d sing the standards— “Ain’t Misbehavin” or “Makin Whoopee!” as his steam tractor wobbled through the flat fertile fields. We’d all smile to imagine him singing his heart out. Once, I watched him put his arm into soil elbow deep and come away with loam black as pitch and teeming with worms. “All of life is here,” he said to me. Grandfather, the soldier, had a grand mustache that made him look like Pancho Villa. He fought with Black Jack Pershing in the Belleau woods where corpses outnumbered the bullet scarred oaks. He would don his uniform and his tin cap to shoot targets with his long gun at a quarter mile range. I never saw him miss. Fingering a spent cartridge, he said with a tired smile, “this is death— all who live must meet it.” My grandfather died when I was five. I have few memories. In one I sit on his lap and stare out the kitchen window at the unsuspecting walkers on Riverdale Avenue. We sit in silence— his face is so yellow and worn it seemed carved of candle wax. At the last, I remember I waved goodbye to his hospital window impossibly high in the massive brick then walked away with my mother. Swaying and sobbing, she held my mittened hand too firmly— as if all life depended on it.