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The small Ohio town of Xenia was where both sets of my grandparents lived when I was a kid. Xenia is kind of famous for the massive tornado that almost wiped it out in 1974, a year after I was born. The storm destroyed the house where my father’s parents lived, and I’ve seen photos of that destruction in old family photo albums. In the 1980s, my class at school watched an educational film about tornadoes, and the Xenia disaster was included. That day lit the first spark in my young mind that I wasn’t merely learning history; I was a part of it.

Grammy and Grampop eventually rebuilt their house. My sister and I spent large parts of our summer vacations there. One of our favorite memories is making ice cream by hand with Pop every summer. We used an old hand-cranked device that seemed—from a child’s perspective—to take hours. But the result was always amazing, and even better because we had made it ourselves, together.

In 1979, I was six years old and happily making ice cream.

Grammy passed away in 2005, Dad in 2015, and Pop just a few days ago. Pop was a veteran of the Korean War, and although I remember the shrapnel scar on his leg that you could see whenever he wore shorts in the summer for his route as the local postman, he never talked about his wartime experiences.

Perhaps he was from a generation of men who did not openly discuss their emotional pain. Or perhaps telling your grandkids about the horrors of war isn’t the most natural thing in the world. But in later years, he connected with other vets and began giving presentations about his experiences and supporting and counseling other vets. Having read his typed memoir of being wounded, the subsequent airlift, and his hospitalization, I can only hope that talking about his experiences was part of a healing process.

Pop also did beautiful woodwork in his shop in the basement—the only part of the original house to survive the tornado, and a place where my sister and I often spent hours with the toys stored there from the childhoods of my dad and his sister, my aunt. Pop made a ton of frames and glass-fronted cases such as the one that still hangs in Mom’s kitchen to display her glassware collection. I remember how excited he was to recover old lumber in the form of oaken pews from a local church that was shutting its doors.

Though my grandparents disdained alcohol for religious reasons when I was very young, Pop eventually began brewing dandelion wine in that basement, and grape wine from grapes he grew himself in the backyard. It had nothing to do with the fact that Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine is one of my favorite novels, but that was one more reason to appreciate what Pop was creating.

I can’t count how many times I read this book.

This week, I requested that a tree be planted in Pop’s honor. I felt it was a fitting tribute to a woodworker, and doubly so since his grandson has printed so many books on paper. The tree will be planted in Michigan, where I spent so many of my most formative years as a writer, musician, and artist. Pop will always be with me in my creative endeavors. Whether they are paintings, books, drawings, comics, home-brewing experiments, or whatever, I learned something from Pop about the value of making things myself.

I brewed my own mead back in 2017.

Cheers, Pop. Let’s make something awesome for them to remember us by.