man playing the piano. A pictograph that was made some four thousand years before the piano was even invented!
"Other
people:' my grandfather said, "claim the Maya were the ten Lost Tribes
of Israel or travelers from outer space." He avowed his determination
to solve the mystery once and for all, and thus devoted his last years
to archaeological excavations and the deciphering of Mayan hieroglyphics.
As
to his early family history, my grandfather was raised in a New York
City orphanage until he was sixteen and had barely two years of formal
schooling. He married in his thirties, but my grandmother died in a
freak accident with two of their three children, leaving my father,
who was eight, to be raised with the help of a housekeeper, Flossie
Luck Farr, an older woman who never married.
At
that time, Grandfather was managing editor of The Providence journal,
a small New England weekly. When he retired some fifteen years later,
he traveled continuously for decades. I once saw a review of a book
of his in Time magazine, but I don't remember ever seeing the
book itself.
Although
my grandfather visited infrequently, I have pleasant recollections of
a cheerful, energetic man, quite tall, who would wake me before dawn
to go hiking, and mimic bird-calls with his black plastic piccolo. I
remember clearly his searching, but kindly grey eyes, a soft, brown
leather jacket, and his rather jolly white beard. I don't remember hearing
that he suffered any illness right up to the time of his death at the
age of 94. 1 never thought to ask any questions about him until after
my father died and of course by then there was no one left to ask.
About
ten years ago, I received a package with a return address of a Quaker
Meeting House in High Gate, Vermont. In the box, carefully arranged
in what I later learned were antique embroidered altar cloths, I found
what appeared to be my grandfather's last earthly possessions.
There
were three books: Five Acres and Independence, a worn
leather volume of Robinson Crusoe, and Poems of Cabin and
Field, by Paul Laurence Dunbar. There was also a compass; a hand-wrought
and much battered silver mug with a dragon handle; a pen-knife; his
piccolo; a glass ball wrapped in a black silk scarf; two monogrammed
gold cuff-links; a