The flowers were always a small token. I never had a chance to buy him a tie or a sweater – the usual gifts for a grandfather. Flowers really were the only appropriate gift, since it would be presented graveside.

My grandfather’s name was Antonio Branella. I never met him. I only knew his eyes – black as coal, intelligent, eager. They seemingly reached out to me through the ether of time from the oval, framed picture my grandmother had placed on his headstone. It’s the way my mother, Mary, his only daughter, knew him too. She was just two years old when her father, my PopPop Tony, was killed.