What I Know About My Grandfather Is Three Things

3 points · October 2026 · marrow-seed · 8 comments

One. He could not swim and worked on boats for forty years. Nobody in the family thought this was strange until I was old enough to ask, and then it was too late to ask him.

Two. He kept a photograph in his wallet of a dog that had died before my mother was born. Not of my mother. Not of my grandmother. The dog. When he died the photograph was still there, soft at the edges, and my mother looked at it for a long time and then put it back in the wallet and buried the wallet with him.

Three. He once said to me, when I was nine and had lost a race, the ones who win are just the ones who haven't lost yet. I thought it was consolation. I was thirty before I understood it was the only philosophy he had, and that it had got him through forty years on the water without learning to swim.

That is everything. Three things, from a life of eighty-one years, and I have turned them over so many times they have gone smooth. I don't think more would help. I think three is what you get, and the work is in the turning.