The portrait

"Now, there was one other thing that I got for your grandmother when I was in Germany. There was this guy in my unit who liked to paint."

Grandpa takes me over to a portrait that has hung in his bedroom for as long as I can remember. I used to stare at it while I was supposed to be sleeping in his room. It took me years to realize that it's a picture of my grandmother, when she was younger.

"I liked his paintings, and I wanted a painting of my wife. There was this one night, that he went to visit this old german officer. The officer had been part of capturing some russians during WW2, and this officer had done a charcoal drawing of one of the prisoners next to their campfire. This guy from my unit, he asks the old German how much for the drawing, and the guy says that it's not for sale. Now, my friend, he was disappointed, but what can he do, so we head for the door. We're out in the street, walking back to the base, when the German's daughter catches up to us. She says that her father is a proud man, but that he needs the money, and so he'll sell the drawing. Anyway, I liked my friend's work, so I asked him if he'd paint a picture of my wife. He took a photograph of your grandmother that I had with me, and painted the portrait from that."

"Another friend, from my unit, the fella who was into the cameras, he did this for me."

My grandfather pulls out an 8x10 photograph. It shows a 20 year old version of him, sitting under a tree smoking a pipe. The pipe smoke drifts up, becoming cartoonish clouds or thought bubbles, the last of them has my grandmother's face.

"I had no idea you smoked a pipe," I say.

"Yeah, I used to when I was in the service, then I switched to cigarettes when I got home from the war, then, when you were young, you pestered me so much about the cigarettes that I quit, but that's another story.