I always sit on one end of the sofa. Last week, across a couple days, I ended up taking three photos of coffee cups while I was sitting in that spot. Three different photos. One with tea, one with coffee, one with decaf.

I think I took naps after two of those cups. I’m becoming a bit like my grandfather who took naps every day after lunch. He’d be out early, working. He’d eat lunch, take a nap, and go back out to work.

But he always was in to watch Walter Cronkite at 6:00 pm. Sitting in the rocking chair that is now, though you can’t see it, to the left of the coffee cup in the photo.

When I was born, he was 68, a year older than I am now. All my memories of him, from the 21 years our lives overlapped, are years that I am now living into.

I never knew the eleven-year-old who immigrated from Sweden, seeing his dad for the first time in a decade. I never knew the man whose first wife died in one of the illnesses that moved through their area in northwest Wisconsin, leaving him with their young son. I never knew the man who married his first wife’s sister, and who, together with her, raised four daughters. I never knew the man who somehow made a life farming, who one Sunday walked out of one church in response to the pastor. I never knew the man who watched one son-in-law die young, leaving five kids. I never knew the man who watched his youngest daughter move to the city to attend a college without more of a plan than “God will provide.”

The man I knew was shaped by all of that into a man of strength and patience, of hard work and walks alone in the woods, of a subtle humor and messy workbench. A man who outlived his wife by hours.

I may be just getting old enough to learn how to live by thinking about Grandpa John.

After I get another nap.