the bars beckon me tonight.

i hear it in a high-pitched scream outside my window and the faint and frenzied music humming through my ceiling.

life is good. i want to celebrate. at least that is what i think in the moments when i sit back and mull over the happenstances of the last week. the help of a friend and some seriously bold moves landed me in the newsrooms of a daily for a few contract shifts. and an interview landed at another media outlet. the grass is sprouting greener and greener. i feel myself on the edge of something better, a dream niggling at my consciousness for years now.

but when life throws you a tantalizing tidbit, expect a bit of a dose of reality too. my other moments of pondering are preoccupied with the bad. and it is then that i want to drown my sorrows in a beer. my grandfather is dying. all week i have been reminded of this fact. yesterday my mother asked me to write his obituary. i don't want to have to learn how to write an obituary. but i will.

and i will tell everyone what they already know -- that my grandfather is the strongest person i know, that i will ever know and that i love him endlessly for his booming voice, his rich laugh and an eternal willingness to help anyone and everyone in his community. he built the town, he maintained the town and he even buried many in the town.

his legacy is one i can't even begin to fathom.

i wrote a poem for him on his 80th birthday. to celebrate the milestone, opa, which is german for grandfather and what all his grandkids call him, hosted a party at the Lion's Hall in town, providing free food and alcohol to hundreds of friends and family. we honoured him that night. and i am grateful that he gave us the opportunity.

this is the poem i wrote for him, and that i will read at his funeral if i am even able to be there.



opa

as the years go by and age piles on, you are left with the niggling feeling that the world does not stop for you, nor you for the world, for if we are to stop at all we would be suspended in time and the movement of time is what, in the end, makes life worth living, flowers worth growing and what is best in life is the savouring of each moment as its grains of sand crunch and slip through your hands, the feel of it, the smell of it, the taste of the salt left on your hands after it has long ago passed through and who knows more abou the nitty-gritty sand and dirt and mid than opa frank, who never looks a day over sixty, which is when i met him for the first time.

opa with that angular nose and wispy white hair, hands covered in grease, and sharp blue eyes.

opa, always on the go with oma at his tail forever asking him when he'd be back.

opa, ducking out to do his rounds of a town he owned, he built, he buried, a town that opa never let down, always summoning up his excess energy even when he had none to go out to kick those furnaces until they burped and spit out heat, or so it has been since i met him 20 years ago and his booming voice surely greeted me from across the house causing my eyes to but out and my frizzy hair to stand on end, his booming voice shook the oak table sending bugs and children scrambling for cover under tables and behind unsuspecting adults who laughed remembering all to well running at the same age, when opa's laugh still sounded like a bark and growl, but as your hair begins to grow past your shoulders and as you grow into your bulging big eyes and you get taller and taller so that you can see above the belly, you start to see that opa's face is constantly breaking into smile and that really his booming voice is just happiness that cannot be quiet.