Missing my grampa today

This is silly but whenever I see a chimpanzee I think of my grampa because his face really looked like one. Not in a goofy way but short, big ears, always a funny expression, and always a good time. Whenever I smell Houbigant musk on someone it just takes me back to when I was a little girl and I miss him so much I can hardly breathe. What I wouldn't give to walk into gramas house and there he is watching Sanford and Son and Mash and the Muppet Show and omaha Wild kingdom. Im so grateful that I had someone in my life growing up who found no fault in me whatsoever. I was the apple of his eye and he never said a mean word to me in my entire life. Times down the road that were dark and unhappy - that is what kept me grounded and clear. I feel sorry for my little sister because she had no one in her life ever look out for her that way, not her dad, no one, and I understand how we can be the same and yet so different. I didn't have to go out and look for acceptance and love from other people by being wild and bad because it was always there. She had to search externally for those things and that explains it all. It's not fair because every girl needs someone in her corner cheering her on and not something that I have taken for granted. My grampa was not a picnic for many years, drinking and brawling and being pretty unbearable to his family. I must have been something that softened his heart because my dad said it all quit when I came along. My mom said I was about 2 months old and he lost his balance on his pontoon and dropped me in the lake. And he jumped in and got me. That's funny. I remember when I was 5 and they took me to Pikes Peak for summer vacation in their big 5th wheeler and we were sitting on this huge boulder in the middle of a stream drinking a&w rootbeer. He was teasing me about cabbages and we picked up these hitch hikers and there were indian posts and shops all over going up the side of the mountain and no rails anywhere. I was so scared that were going move 2 inches over and roll down the mountain.
I can see him telling me about how him and Homer went and shot all those stray cats at Homers Pond. He was grinning from ear to ear and his eyes just sparkled. My grampa was cool if there was one person in this world who never had to grow old and go away just be around forever it would be him. They had some cat named kinky guess he had a kink in his tail- the cat got up on the bar and ate my grampas raisin pie. He kicked that cat through the screen door and killed him and then he went and buried that sonofab.. everything was a son-of-a-b to him and I just have to laugh, my grampa worked heavy machinery and he worked at the dump. All of his friends would come out there and visit him and bring him whiskey so he was drunk every day before he even got home from work. And most of our french familywere bad alcoholics it's in my blood. And through all that he was in church every sunday, father kramer was over for happy hour every single day at 5 oclock, he said his rosary every night and sometimes when I get scared I get his rosary out of my jewelry and sleep with it in my hand.

I think most of all I just feel honored to have meant so much to him. I was my grampas safe place as much as he was mine. I remember when my uncle pat was killed in 1982 and there were secret service agents up on the roof of our school and the church, President Reagan sent an enormous wreath of flowers it was the hugest thing this city had ever seen. And my grampa was sitting there beside that casket and I walked over to him and hugged him and he cried and told me that no one would miss him more than he would. They didn't get along at all and things were just starting to become right and then this happened. And his last day, he was there in icu and I was there with him all alone and he said tell grama how much I love her. She's a good woman and I don't know why she stayed with me all those years. Those words are seared in me and how lucky I was to be there and be the one that he shared that with. And when he died and I kissed him goodbye on the cheek in his casket everybody thought that was weird. They just never understood me. I thank my lucky stars for you grampa and miss you every single day.