Today’s podcast is about my Grandfather, Joseph Andrew Prudell. My mother’s father. Lately I have enjoyed a curiosity about him as I look over the few photos of him, and especially his letters, written to me with illustrations. I always look for hints of his boisterous, mischievous personality.

Can you inherit something like a personality? Your genes are what lasts beyond death, through the ages. They are the most valuable thing you have – and you give them freely to the next generation. In Grandpa’s case, I’m describing this one trait: the ‘confrontational practical joke’ a lighthearted ‘gotcha’ that can be, if too insistent, off-putting, but with the right balance of energy, the kind of thing that makes you laugh in spite of yourself. That was my Grandpa, and that’s my brother P.

And look at that, a group family photo worthy of Instagram. That’s Grandpa waving the background. My mother is in the white dress. She looks to be 15 or so.

This is the only photo and record of Joe’s family of origin that I have. And yet I carry their genetics as part of who I am. So they live on, visible and yet never seen.

‘Grandpa’s Story’, today’s podcast, is the first piece of my writing that was published.

And looking at it, I realize that I still don’t really know that very much about him; he was my Grandpa, he had been an engineer in Wisconsin, he married Marie Klein in the Philippines.

Gramma Marie had romantic-looking adventures, and five children with Joe.  She was a gramma when she died in her sixties, when my mother was pregnant with me. Her hair was white through and through.

A few years later Grandpa married my Gramma Ester. They lived in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin and mostly I knew that I loved them both.

I was lucky to spend a summer week with him in his home in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin when I was fifteen. My parents arranged the trip for my mother to visit her family, as we lived in California, and had been separated all our lives – by that distance. Plane trips and telephone calls were expensive, so our Mother had had very little contact with her family of origin all during our lives.

Here she is standing under the street sign named after her father, with two of her children, my sister M and my brother, P that summer.

That’s Grandpa in his garden in Wauwatosa, the summer I visited. Below, a drawing of our outing sent to me in a letter afterwards. That’s me, Gramma Ester and Grandpa Prudell, illustrated by Grandpa.

There was a photo taken on one of those hot summer days in Wisconsin, a photo which now I remember with a different understanding; I was wading in a body of water and Gramma and Grandpa were looking on. My hair was long down my back, my skin so supple, and I was . . . fifteen! And when that picture was printed, I ached for them, and for the nearby ultimate loss I anticipated feeling when they died. But I brushed it aside, because it wasn’t my issue right then. Far from it: we were on opposite trajectories and I was so excited about mine: getting ready to go into the world!

My granddaughter, H, is now 15.

Illustrations by Gord Halloran.