Two of my three kids, the boys, just finished moving out west for jobs in the trades, working on mountain homes in the Uinta’s and Wasatch range. One’s an electrician and the other is a plumber. My mom, their Nana, has been going through some difficult health issues. Health issues that, sadly, don’t come with happy endings.
I can’t help but think about the parallels between their experiences and mine. The things they’ve inherited from me and my parents, and that I’ve inherited from my parents and grandparents, that we’re carrying forward into our lives. The tangible and intangible elements that helped shape us into who we are today.
My grandma Doris, my dad’s mom, passed away in ’93. I was nineteen and stationed in Erlangen, Germany, but happened to be on a month-long mission in the UK closing a major ammunition storage facility when I got the Red Cross call.
The mortality of family isn’t something on the minds of most 19-year-olds, especially one that’s single and in Europe with a steady paycheck, three-squares, and a lot of freedom. Our own mortality is a slightly different story though. I spent a lot of time running from myself and my small-town youth during my years in the service.
Armed with a brand-new I could die tomorrow and I’m bullet-proof anyhow military mentality, I chose instead to run headlong toward the glorious temptations of underaged independence. The reality is that if I did die around that time, it would have more likely been from stupidity, than the result of anything war related. I came close on more than one occasion, believe me.
I didn’t make it back in time for my grandma’s funeral. By the time I had caught a space-available flight back to Germany, then another one back to the States, I had missed everything by a full day. I don’t have any recollection of the time I spent during that short visit home. Like most other memories from my break-neck young-adult life, they have been squirreled-away in some dusty corner of my mind, where they wait patiently for a sound, smell or other inadvertent prompt to call them forward.
What has remained with me is the hollow and angry feeling I had from losing my grandma and not being able to be there for my dad. He had lost his dad to cancer when he was nineteen, and now his mom. It was my responsibility as his son to be there, to stand with him as people expressed their condolences, to have him put his arm around my shoulders and be strong and find a joke the way he and I do to laugh through tough times. Even now, typing this, I feel it still.
Many years later, shortly after Christmas, my dad had stopped by one morning to visit with the kids and catch up for a little while. As we walked out onto the porch when he was leaving, he turned and pulled some paper out of his pocket.
“So, for a few years before your grandma died, she had bought you and your sister savings bonds…for birthdays and Christmas and such. I figured that it was a good time to give them to you. They’ve probably matured by now. I also figured I’d give them just to you, because these were from your grandma to you. Of course, she wanted you to use them to become a doctor…”
We both smiled at that one.
I decided to have a custom, fiberglass fly rod built. I called Jordan Ross of JP Ross Rods, and over the course of the next few months we landed on a yolk-yellow fiberglass blank, wraps, and host of other beautiful components that would eventually compose a one-of-a-kind 6’11’ small stream rod.
My grandma understood the importance and value of the outdoors to my dad, and by extension, me. My dad was a hell-raiser growing up, but he also grew up hunting, fishing, laying traps, and generally spending as much time out in nature as possible.
As a kid, I loved the time he and I spent in the woods and on the water. There was nothing more precious and I learned a lot more about character and what it takes to be successful in life while in tree stands and standing on the shore of Canandaigua Lake than I could’ve possibly appreciated at that age.
Those lessons live on in my boys whose souls are immersed in the outdoors. I’m witnessing first-hand the legacy of that inheritance as they hike, camp, fish, and explore the mountains, deserts, woods, and water of the west. Something that also brings great joy to their nana as they recount stories of their experiences.
The fact that I did not once pick up a fishing rod, bow, or shotgun during my entire time in the Army — in Germany, England, Missouri, Alabama, or Georgia —made my decision to have this rod built as a gift from my grandma a fitting way to remember her. Back in ’93 I was as far from my passions as I could get. But I’d like to think that she knew I’d find my way back, maybe even adding a little divine nudge here and there, and that I would appreciate a fiberglass inheritance that is so much more than just a fly rod.
