Visiting the Old Folks Home

I had an interesting visit with my Grandpa today.  I stopped in while he and his friends at their independent living facility were involved in a rousing game of BINGO.  My Grandpa is your pretty typical old fella.  He's lived a lot of life and has the stories to prove it.  Today was no different.  I heard about how he'd gotten the measles immediately followed by scarlet fever in the fifth grade.  He missed a good chunk of the class, but his teacher passed him on to the sixth grade anyway.  He said he struggled in school from then on.  He brought up a trip my sisters and I took to St. Louis with him and Grandma when I was about eight or nine years old.  Now that was a trip to remember!  He talked  about his love for gambling but how Las Vegas just wasn't the same since it became a family town.  He liked it better when it was for adults only.  Of course, he added that not having Grandma with him anymore just made taking those kinds of trips seem pointless.  That was really the point of the story. 

Some of my grandpa's stories are repeats, stories I've heard him tell before.  He tells them with fondness and great introspection.  Stories about his military service, growing up playing high school football, dropping out of college.  He tells of his world travels with my grandma.  They went just about everywhere and did just about everything.  He talks occasionally about his father, a man small in stature but stout of heart who loaded boxcars for a living.  Sometimes they're stories I wonder why he's sharing, seeming to have no connection to the moment we're currently experiencing.  But I listen just the same. 

I sometimes think he's reliving the past through his autobiographical history lessons.  Other times I am certain he's hoping I can learn some valuable life lesson from his personal experiences. His stories are often told for pure entertainment and other times as cautionary tales. No matter the motivation, the result is the same.  My grandpa is leaving his fingerprints on this world, making sure something of his life succeeds him, guaranteeing his memory outlives his body.

I think we all have that thing inside of us that causes us to want to preserve some part of ourselves for posterity.  It's the reason we take pictures, keep journals, blog.  It's the reason we procreate, invent and 
proselytize.  We want to send some part of ourselves into a future world we won't be actively participating in.  We want to stake a claim to a moment in time, put our mark on it, make it our own.  We want to take our place in history and make sure someone knows we existed. 

None of us want to pass through this life unnoticed.  We want to leave something behind that proves we traveled this path on our journey.  Whether through the transfer of knowledge or through passing on of our genetic material or through sharing the milk of human kindness, whether through fame or talent, in small ways or monumental ones, whether through acts of great bravery or sacrifice, through conquests or accomplishments, whether for all the world or just our little one, we all seek to leave an indelible mark that says, "I was here".

I want to know when I am gone that some part of me still remains.  I want be in the hearts of the people who knew me.  I want the people who love me to love me still, to talk about me with genuine affection.  I want my legacy to be a good one, that I was a good wife and mother, that I gave more than I took, that my influence was powerful and positive.  As I live and die, as we are all living and dying daily, may our fingerprints be firmly and forcefully left behind on a life embraced and lived exceedingly well.