The Perfect Man

Women around the world search for the elusive "perfect man." We have ideas of what he should be, what he should say, and how he should love us. I am happy but a little wistful to say that I found the perfect man, as long ago as I can remember. His name was A.C. "Bud" Scott, and he was my my mother's father, my Grandpa.

I never referred to him as "Grandpa Scott" - when anyone in my family said "Grandpa," we all knew who was meant. No holiday was complete without him and Grandma, and no summer could pass without some long visits with them. I suppose it's easier to be a grandfather than a father; you miss most of the difficult times of a child's behavior, most of the diapers, and most of the worry when Daddy's "baby girl" is out with a boy some evening. But Grandpa knew how to love unconditionally, while demonstrating to each of his grandchildren what was appropriate behavior, and what wasn't. He never lectured about values; he showed them to us with how he lived.

My earliest memories of Grandpa were as a child of perhaps three, jumping into his arms from the loft in the lake cabin he built in the 1930s. It never even crossed my mind that he might not catch me; he was my rock. I remember fishing with him, along with my sisters, at the lake, early in the morning. You had to get up early to fish with Grandpa, and although I wasn't a morning person even as a baby, I would get out of bed to do anything with Grandpa. We all learned to bait our own hooks, and what size fish we could keep, and what to throw back and catch when it grew up a little. We all learned that if we caught it, we had to humanely remove the hook, because even fish feel pain. And at his side, we learned the beauty of silence and of patience.

I learned the patience lesson again while crouching near him as he made a chucking noise, holding out a piece of food, wating for a chipmunk to come and take it from his hands. Animals knew his kindness by instinct. None of them feared him, and the shyest animal would become his friend in a matter of minutes, whether it was a chipmunk, a dog, or even a fawn. All of them knew that his hands were kind and loving.