My paternal grandfather "Grampa Moses" was a little, twinkly-eyed French-Canadian who was always singing and telling me stories. He uses to let me "help" in the basement workshop when I was a little kid and I learned fractions by sorting the sockets in the socket set into their proper places. He died when I was 13 at the age of 84 and I still miss him 25 years later. But, I have a copy of a field recording of him done by Margaret MacArthur, so he will always be with me, in a sense.

My paternal grandfather and I were also very close. He was a WW2 vet who was on the Italian front and received a bronze star and cluster and at least one purple heart. He never talked about any of it. He worked in several woolen mills after the war as a "fixer" until he retired at 65. We used to watch old westerns and the World Series on TV together and we did a lot of camping in the White Mountains. This is all good stuff, but he could be a real mean SOB, too. He used to gamble and drink his entire paycheck on payday. leaving my grandmother scrambling to find food to feed a family of six for the next week. He could say some god-awful nasty things and a bit of a bully sometimes, too, but he was better with me than he was with his own kids. I like to think I was his second chance to get being a parent right, as he and my grandmother raised me until I was about six. He died 14 years ago at the age of 69, terminally ill with some lung problem that he probably picked up in the mills, by his own hand. I was living with he and my grandmother at the time and I was the last person he spoke to: "good night, little one" as I headed to bed.