It’s interesting what sets off memories. My father passed away on March 13th 2019. He didn’t have any long illness, no memory issues, and in reality was as sharp the day he died as he was when I was a wayward teenager. In fact he scheduled his own room at hospice, settled all his affairs on his own, and pretty much took care of everything. As he said to me, he was just done. He was tired, and dammit, at 82, outliving all his siblings and most of his friends he wanted a rest.
After he passed, I went to his apartment and cleaned out his things. Among all the papers, books, pictures, and clothes I found the set of dominos my grandfather had actually left me when he passed. I would sit for hours and watch my father and grandfather play dominos. My grandmother would be milling around the kitchen making breakfast, talking to me while I intently tried to understand the game. They kept score with two abacuses my grandfather made. At that age I couldn’t really follow the scoring, but I understood the rules and how they matched the numbers.
My grandfather claimed that the dominos were made of ivory. They’re not of course. But it was a good story for a five year old. They brought back a flood of memories of spending the night with my grandparents on weekends, getting up to the smell of bacon and sounds from the kitchen, and knowing that that house was to this day the safest place I have ever been.
I packed the dominos with a smile, remembering the drives there, sometimes at 4 or 5 on a Sunday morning when I didn’t spend the weekend to have breakfast and watch two of my favorite people play a game of dominos. In fact, it is my father and grandmother that my wife can blame for me getting up at the crack of the day before when she wants to sleep.
Shortly after I got all these things home, I found I had lost one of the dominos. I had no idea where it went. It broke my heart. My grandfather died when I was 11. I was devastated that after all these decades I lost one of them from the set. I know, it’s only a domino, but it meant something to me. It was my childhood, a memory that is more important to me than so many other memories I carry.
The dominos along with a few other keepsakes from my father, like his jewelry box, and his class ring, decks of cards, eyeglasses sit in the bookcase behind me with pictures of our family when we were all together…we were all so young. Even my parents in that picture were likely 20 years younger than I am today.
I’m moving in a few weeks, and have been ransacking my office, tossing old books, papers, and who knows what that’s been rolling around in my desk. I’m a bit of a pack rat. As I was pulling books from the shelves that sit behind me in my office, low and behold, there lay the number 3 domino. A flood of memories came to me. Sitting listening to my dad and grandfather talk, watching my grandmother, the kindest and most Christian person I’ve ever known, make me breakfast, and wishing, wishing with everything in my being that I could just sit and watch one more game.
Rex