By Al Reimer
I never knew my maternal grandfather Jacob K. Kehler, who died four years before I was born. And yet, I’ve often felt that he knew me, that he has lived inside me all these years, inspiring my love language, firing my bursts of imagination, shaping my temperament and slyly stimulating my fondness for verbal acrobatics and the telling of tall tales.
Why do I make this somewhat bizarre claim? Because the older I get the more strongly I can feel my immediate begetters, my parents and grandparents, wrapping themselves ever more tightly around my own identity–like those Russian (babushka) dolls that fit so snugly inside each other. And the more I think and learn about those begetters, the more intimate that feeling becomes. And the more richly satisfying the process of self-exploration becomes.
Read the rest of this article (in PDF), as published in Preservings, No.14, June, 1999