grandparents and logs

I never got to know my grandparents before they passed away. On one side of the family, I met them as a small child; on the other, they were dead long before my birth. For the obvious temporal reason and a geographic one (none of them lived in the U.S., where I grew up), their stories and their effect on my parents' stories are essentially unbeknownst to me. My parents have told me that I'm most similar to the grandparents I never met, especially my grandfather. He had diverse interests, dreams, and goals for life, and I can only imagine what we would have thought up if we’d met. 

I hear he was a dynamic personality, a good man who experienced the vicissitudes of life. The relatively few stories I've heard about him (the most interesting of which aren't destined for the public web) give me a scintilla of who he was as a person, but I have far from enough information to construct a complete story out of it. So if I were to backtrack my ancestry, this is probably where I'd start. The contents of my knowledge are that his name was Emilio (one of my middle names), he got a Rolex for working at the Post Office for ten years, he talked about tilapia aquaculture before anyone really did it, and that he liked boats.

No one who wasn't there for the story as it unfolded seems to be willing to tell it. None of my aunts or uncles, my grandfather's children, ever seem to discuss it. None of their spouses know the story either, my parents included. I’ve asked several times, but never seem to get a coherent answer or story. But the lack of a compelling or cohesive narrative to me only furthers the notion that it is an important one. Knowing the trajectory of his life, his view of the world and what he tried to impress upon his children, might be more informative than my parents’ view of the world and what they try to teach me. I never had grandparents, so I don’t have much knowledge of how helpful that might be, but a paradigm shift to thinking of my parents as children could yield a lot of new information that I don’t have now.

In the three minutes between now and finishing the previous paragraph, I thought about getting a good picture of a week in the life of my parents’ childhoods. Then I started thinking about a slice of my childhood, something that has more depth of detail and covers a larger period of time than a photo album. I just remembered that my babysitter as a kid wrote journal entries every day summarizing what I did so my parents could read them and live my days vicariously. No one’s touched them in years, but the quotidian records have the potential to illustrate and retouch my memories of childhood. Maybe I’ll recall many things I thought I’d forgotten, and maybe even find those genuine 12-year-old dreams that Antoine Wilson talked about.