A touch on my shoulder

So, my grandparents passed a few years ago, a bare handful of weeks apart, but we have since moved to where they grew up and lived, where I grew up, actually, and the memories are thick. It feels good. But yesterday, it was as if my grandfather touched my shoulder and smiled, reminding me how close the ties are though we may believe they are sundered or even not there. It wasn’t that big of a thing either, just me being me, and him having been him, and all of this circled around a silly word that I’d found the week before while looking up the spelling of something else.

The word had sounded familiar enough that I paused and checked out the definition, wanting to know if there would ever be a time I could use it, and, seeing as it basically means being calm under pressure due to having a pattern of action, I decided I could. Even so, it’s one of those words you can only use once a book, though I will probably limit myself to using it once ever four due to its uniqueness. I wanted to use it, and I wanted to use it bad.

As it happened, my family was over for dinner that weekend, and when the conversation turned to what I was up to, I brought out my shiny new word with the help of Thing Two going out to my office for the sticky note I’d written the word on. We had a laugh over it, and everyone that night worked with a sangfroid calmness as we cleaned the table and packed up the leftovers.

The touch on my shoulder came a few days later when my mom emailed me to tell me that she had, in a quiet moment, pulled out my Grandpa’s dictionary, the one he always marked unique words he found while reading and wasn’t sure of their meaning. My new word was marked. And I felt a kiss on my cheek and a pat on my shoulder . . . and I smiled.