May you lay to rest among the mountains which you taught me to love so dearly.

Three cups of flour, three eggs, three cups of milk, one-third cup of oil, two tablespoons of baking powder, one-half cup of sugar, and a quarter teaspoon of salt.

My Dad and Grandfather Grilling on Planting Ground Lake

Blend.

Place a griddle on the stovetop on high heat, wait until it’s hot (this was always the hardest part for me. My family will tell you, I am admittedly not very patient especially when I am hungry), splash a few drops of water onto the pan, if the water dances and sizzles, melt butter onto the griddle followed by heaping dollops of batter, wait again, flip each pancake when you begin to see the top bubble, but more realistically when your family notices a slightly charred smell, remove from heat when the fire alarm goes off.

Burnt blender pancakes became a running joke in my family. They weren’t always burnt, but when they were, it was typically at the hands of my Grandfather.

Growing up in New England gave my sisters and I, what I’ve come far too familiar with as an “east coast edge.” This is to say that we convey love through sarcasm and ridicule––a love language that few people outside of New England understand, and far fewer appreciate. When Grandpa burnt pancakes, we were ruthless. The chaos of the smoke alarm, and our parents frantically swinging towels through the air to dispel the smoke had all three of us hunched over cackling until our cheeks hurt.

I should emphasize that my Grandpa indeed made incredible pancakes, but memories of mornings in a smokey kitchen and panicking parents are cemented in the repertoire of my earliest childhood memories.

Grandpa’s pancake recipe is the only one of many family recipes passed down through generations I can nearly recall by heart. This is partially due to the sheer volume of pancakes that my family has made over the years, but mostly due to the ease of the recipe. Leave it up to my Grandpa, who claims he didn’t understand math until he got to calculus, to create such an eloquently numbered recipe.

I share this story not because it is the most prominent memory I have of him, nor because the smell of a smokey kitchen still makes me giggle, but because it reveals, that like everyone, my Grandpa was imperfect. While I am your typical type-A, perfectionist, my Grandpa taught me that we must embrace imperfection.

Grandpa and I at the Cumberland Fair (Cumberland, ME 2011)

He showed me that mistakes are as inevitable as the seasonal changes of the constellations. Orion’s belt, was his favorite, but it doesn’t appear in the night sky during the month of August. I know this because he painted the constellations from the August night sky, when I was born, on the ceiling of my first bedroom. In tribulation, he decided whether or not to include Orion. Although Orion isn’t always physically visible, he knew that it would always reappear, as with similar certainty he knew, that he would burn more pancakes.

The summer after my First Year at Santa Clara University, my best friend, visited me in Maine. I wanted to show her my home from my favorite vantage point: the waters of Casco Bay.

The only hindrance was my dad’s deliberate rule that prohibited me from taking the boat out without him. My most notable characteristic is my drive. While in many ways it is a positive attribute, it has tested my parent’s patience nearly everyday for the past 22 years.

I knew that if I asked my dad to take out the boat, the response would be a definitive “no.” So, I didn’t ask. It was a quintessential Maine day; I wanted, so badly to tell my dad about how beautifully the boat road through the water, how I carved in and out of the lobster buoys like he did, and how I docked the boat perfectly, but I held it in.

A week later, he confronted me.

“When were you gonna tell me you took the boat out.”

My expression went blank and my face turned as white as a sheet. I panicked. Internally I thought back through the day to search for any memory of something that could have gone wrong. Guilt stricken, I asked how he found out.

“You didn’t tie it up right.” He replied.

In utter disbelief that this was how he caught me, I responded: “you’ve got to be kidding me.” How could I have possibly tied it differently, when he and my Grandpa were the ones who taught me. Upon reflection, my dad adopted the same ownership of “his boat” as my Grandpa: the only person allowed to drive and the only one who noticed the slightest difference when anyone else docked.

In my defense, the two of them have no one to blame but themselves for revealing the thrill that accompanies speed, both on the water and in the mountains.

Emigrant Wilderness Loop Traill (Summer 2020)

Throughout his life, my Grandpa was truly in an endless pursuit of the next great frontier, but I didn’t understand what that meant until the summer of 2020. I was backpacking through California’s Emigrant Wilderness––just north of Yosemite Valley––with three of my closest fiends. One night, we sat silently to watch the sun set over the mountains we spent the previous days climbing. Simultaneously, we internalized the beauty and serenity of the wilderness around us. In those moments, I felt my eyes well up with unabated tears.

For the first time, I understood what my grandfather had been seeking in the outdoors, for so long. I felt an intrinsic connectedness not only to the world around me, but to him.

I saw the nobility of the trees that towered over the forest floor and the innocence of the mayflowers blowing in the wind.

I think that the tears were a product of an engrained understanding that despite my Grandfather’s inability to share that physical experience with me, we were similarly captivated by the outdoors. In those moments, I saw him as a role model, in a way I hadn’t before. Until then, I wasn’t ready for the lessons he taught me while I grew up. In all honesty, I had been completely oblivious to the wealth of knowledge he had to share.

Timing is peculiar, because while my Grandfather was teaching me the greatest lessons of my life, I wasn’t ready to appreciate them. In moments of personal reflection, I wish that I could return and thank him.

Grandpa teaching at Northern Michigan University

My Grandpa was a physicist, cemented in his knowledge that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Despite my inability to tell him, I share these memories with you all today, confident that he knows how deeply he impacted me, because I know that his energy remains in the waves that crash under the dock, the howling of the wind through frozen tree branches, the flames of roaring beach fires, the jubilant smiles from the first bite of ice cream. I feel his energy in the sighs of relief and pride after turning in a final exam, in the blustering sails of ships, and in the love that I feel from my family when I travel far from home. He taught me that love is not in spite of, but because of burnt pancakes and that love, like Orion’s belt, might leave my physical vantage point, but with certainty, it will return with the same vigor as if it were permanently posited in the night sky.