Who Do I Think I Am?

My grandfather's always been *the guy*. The one I kind of learned  the majority of my lessons about how to be a man. I look like my dad, have some of his mannerisms, but I'm much more similar to my grandfather.

Papa Louis

We love salt. I mean, we like sugar, but he and I *love* salt. You know that big jug of pretzels that looks like a barrel that you get from the Costco? He and I would lick our fingers and go to the bottom and bring up a middle finger that looked like Shak'n Bak Chick'n. I didn't get to eat it because I wrestled and he didn't get to because he had high blood pressure. My grandmother, his wonderful wife, would make us boiled chicken breast and broccoli and we were miserably healthy. We both know why wars were fought over it.

He was a professor at my alma mater, well before I arrived, and an assistant to the president there. When he went back to his home country, he led the senate for several years. He even ran for president of the country. He lost, but he ran, he was in the game. He was a fancy, super smart guy. Like if you combined Dr. Huxtable and the King from Coming to America. My grandmother was like his queen. She made him a better version of who he could be and he knows that to this day, 9 years after she passed away.

He used to collect animal figurines and some animal skins. Actually, they both did. I think it was the years they spent in Zaire (or whatever it's been named over the years). I remember a lot of lion skins and giraffes. They were always around the house. It was like his thing. Not *actual* giraffes, but there were a ton of plants and animals always around. When I graduated from college, he already started to slip a little with one of a series of strokes, excess hospital stays, and losing his wife and 2 of their 4 kids. But he came to see me walk at my college graduation and when the ceremony was done, he looked at me and said,

"You really look like the captain of your own ship, Grandson. Now listen, you know why I collect giraffes?

"No papa, why?"

"A giraffe is the real king of the jungle. everyone says it's the lion, but it's not. A giraffes kick will disembowel a lion, but they never kick each other. Be the first to see trouble, stick your neck out for what you believe in, and never be afraid to go out and get the high-hanging fruit."

He told me how he grew up the son of a farmer in 1926, in a small village in rural Haiti. He never expected to be much. His dad died young and his mother re-married to a hard, mean-spirited man. A man who hated the kid who wasn't his own - it hardened him. Until recently, he never really let that guard down. This is the man who guided me to who I'm becoming.