Praying the our Father: Thanksgiving

By David Torkington

Jacob's Ladder in the Via Latina Catacombs (Wikimedia Commons).

My earliest and happiest memories  are of going to visit my grandfather. It wasn’t because he played games with me, gave me  my favourite chocolate or even money to buy myself an ice cream on the way home, it was just because I  loved him. He  was such a lovable kindly man  that it was more than enough just to be with him and feel myself enveloped by his  love. This was before I even went to prep school. By the time I did he was dead  ‘though by today’s standards he was still a young man barely old enough to  draw his pension.

However he left me a legacy of love in his eldest daughter who was my mother.  She was the most loving mother one could wish for, who in spite of the dyslexia that blighted my early life enabled me to grow up with confidence and imbued with a security that only love can give.

I can still see  my grandfather in my imagination with a mop of  white hair and a moustache to match. I saw him over a year ago in my bathroom looking at me through the mirror. I was just raising my hand to shave the soap suds from under my nose that had left me with a white moustache and there he was looking back at me. I had never thought I looked like him before, never given it a second thought, but there he was looking back at me.  It  was undoubtedly him. The only trouble was the face that looked back at me wasn’t the kindly loving face that I remembered with such love, would that it were.


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