I'm not so excited about this moving thing. I am gaining a house, but it's not a home.

My grandpa was always the type of guy that looked and was so serious. About most things. I got to see that he was like that sometimes, but I saw his silly side too. When I was a little kid he would play with me. And old man would get down on the floor and play with me.

For a long time after he died I thought that I wasn’t close with him. I felt like we didn’t have the connection we were supposed to have. But every family member has told me, “Megan, are you kidding? He thought the sun rose and set in you. You could do no wrong. You were the apple of his eye.”

He was my dad’s dad. And when they were growing up, he wasn’t the best dad in the world. He was very tough on them. Nothing really bad, but just tough. I think with me, he got this second chance to fix things, so to speak. And he did. He did.

He was a good man. Decent man. Hardworking. He world on the railroad, for Amtrak for a long time. And legally he was blind. He was blind and only a handful of people knew it. Every year the nurse at Amtrak would pass him, so he could work. He could still do his job and he did it very well. He didn’t let anything stop him. Ha, some would call that being extremely stubborn, which he was.

As I was looking through some old pictures, I found a bunch of him. In the older pictures, he tends to have this scowl on his face. Like he looks mad or grumpy. But as he got older, the scowl faded.

There are things that he taught me, that I will never forget. I learned from him how to have a deep sense of pride not only in myself but in the things that I do in life. He taught me how to slow dance. I’ll never forget that night. It was in the fall or early winter, and the whole family had went out together, and there was a band playing and they started to play a song and he grabbed my hand and said, “Come on.” I was so scared. I didn’t know what I was doing. And he just said, “It’s ok, just dance… even if it’s all over my feet.”

(The song, we danced to.)

One of the best things that he taught me is, it’s never too late to have fun in life.