Grandpa's first haircut

I've been asking my mom all kinds of questions about my Grandpa's family in Worcester. My mom has never met any of her cousins nor has she ever been to Massachusetts. I've always found that incredibly weird. We were at my grandma's house and she made me go into the library to see if there was a photo album in there with pictures of her cousins. She kept telling me that there was a purple photo album in the library with pictures of my Grandpa's side of the family. I of course knew that there was no such photo album in the library because I spent hours and hours as a child going through every photo album in the house. I've always had an obsession with recording the past. I got my first camera when I was five and since have been a big fan of documenting everything. When I was 8 and got my first yearbook from the school I attended 2nd-12th grade, I decided then and there that I MUST be in the journalism class so that I could work on the yearbook. And that I did, and I was newspaper editor. I am very determined to have my Grandpa's high school yearbook. He was one of the city's star athletes in high school and very popular as well. The yearbook captures all of that, and I want it. I know where it is, I am tempted to just take it one day. My mom is one of eight children and I have 16 cousins. My cousin Elisa wants the fancy phone in my grandma's bedroom. My cousin Daniel desperately wants my Grandpa's solid gold watch, but my grandma has already given it to my uncle Greg.

My Grandpa died on September 11th 2005. It has been a while but it is still a difficult thing for me seeing as he is the only person I've been close to who has died and that we were very close. But anyway, my mom and I found a photo album in the library that had some pictures of him as a child and indeed pictures of his family in Massachusetts. It was a green photo album however, not this purple one my mom was looking for. That one is probably upstairs in the room off of my Grandma's bedroom where there are mass amounts of photo albums. It takes a lot of photo albums to hold our family and my Grandparents' travels around the world.

In this green photo album I found this great picture of my Grandpa on a pony. There were two of them, so I stole one. There was also an envelope containing locks from his first haircut. It was weird touching these soft golden brown locks of baby hair cut from my grandpa's head 90 years ago. But it was the same texture I remember his hair. He liked having his head rubbed. I remember sliding myself across the wooden floors on my knees sneaking into the library and popping up behind his favorite chair and rubbing his head. I spent a lot of time in that room with my Grandpa. I would watch I Love Lucy at night and he would read the paper or a Tomy Clancy or Dean Koontz novel.

I stood in the empty space where his chair used to be. It was a weird feeling. One time this past summer I slept in the chair that is in the corner where he died and I felt nothing.