We are all in this thing called life together.

This is a poem by my grandfather.

He wrote poems about everything.

We have stacks and stacks of them in boxes at my parents’ house. My job is to go through them and pick out the best to share.

My dad originally asked me to place them in binders but I think I might actually type them up and make them into a book.

I never met my grandfather. I was only two when he died. Through these poems, though, I am able to learn a lot about him, how his mind worked, and how he looked at the world.

Most of the poems are about places he went or people he met. He wrote poems for waitresses who waited on him and my grandmother or people he met when they traveled. He wrote a poem for Christmas each year, or many years at least, and sometimes he wrote poems for family members.

His poems were simple but sometimes, I don’t know, I feel like there were deeper meanings in them – like in this one above.

“Listen all here’s the deal, you’re a cog in the wheel…”

He was writing about his hospital stay one time, maybe around the same time he was diagnosed with cancer, about the nurses and doctors needed to keep the place running, but there seems to be something deeper in it too: “Don’t know where we’d all be without that wheel, don’t you see?”

Yes, we are all in this thing called life together and Grandpa knew that well.