This morning, I needed to write, and I wasn’t sure about what, so I have sat here looking around in a little coffee shop downtown, across from the UNM campus. It’s a converted house that is loosely filled with mix-and-match tables and chairs. The wood floors are nice. The walls are white or soft blue or light gray. The rooms are open and connected to one another. Behind the whirr of an air movement system, a woman sings a contemporary jazz ditty, her rising voice breaking through the static hum of venting air. Other voices murmur in other rooms. Someone laughs. Someone agrees. Someone reflects on last night. And then the motorized grinder at the counter at the back of the house wakes up and chews up some beans. It is Saturday morning, right at 8 o’clock, and the world is sleeping. The air outside is cool, sparking my mind as my body adjusts to it. It is one of the quietest moments of the week, and I thumb through scattered memories near the front of my brain looking for a topic tis morning. I stumble over a few and stub my brain on a few others that are too wieldy to lift today (or any other day, it seems). The creative juices pump is locked up, and I survey outside and then inside, looking for something.

On my laptop desktop are a cluster of photos I put there at different times. Some are random phone pics suitable for social media blips (my lunch one day, a tree in font of some building, a sunset). On the lower left of the screen are a few images that I got from my folks at some time. I see one that I want to look at directly. Ahh yes. I can work with this.

I never met Willard Scruggs. He was gone before my mother became a mother, and before she was a wife, for that matter. But he has been present in our family through years. A quiet but positive presence. My mom talks about her father with deep love and admiration, even to today. My grandfather was a wonderful man, she shares.

Willard was born in Elkwood, Alabama, even though his family lived across the border in Tennessee. I want to make something of the fact that its hard to say where you are from if you are not born where you otherwise live and grow up, but what should be said? If you go on the internet today, you do not find much of anything about Elkwood, Alabama. At one time it was a meaningful blip, but it is now a one-stop intersection on the way to somewhere else. But he was born there.

I don’t know gobs about Willard, but just a few things. He had a number of brothers. His dad moved from Tennessee to Silverdell, Kansas, when Willard was a lad to take a job at a stone quarry, helping pull rock out of the earth. Willard quit school at age 12 to work at the quarry too. There were mouths to feed, and every quarter counted. Willard never went back to school after that.

Fast forward a few years, and somewhere in there my grandfather found the two things that had the biggest impact on his life. Willard found my grandma Myrtle, a woman he wooed and loved as he worked to whittle out a life for a little family. Willard also found Jesus, and got religion. To some folks, finding Jesus is a curio in someone else- a novelty where you go, “Whatever gets you through the day, bud.” Willard’s Jesus made a difference in his life, and his finding religion was the kind that makes a life change, and keeps love at home. That’s the real kind of finding Jesus that makes a man a mountain and a family a fortress. Willard found Jesus and let it soak all the way through his life, into his soul. And he shared the warm love with others, limited grade school education and all. Stuttering and all. Cragged and calloused hands, quiet consistency, simple silliness and all.

One of my favorite stories from family lore is that Willard, because he quit school so young, never truly learned to read. Embarrassed of this fact, he avoided books and words as a teenager and as a young man, as much as he wanted to read. He downplayed his illiteracy and just worked a lot. Until he discovered the Bible ad wanted to know what was in it. My mom, a teen herself, set out to help him learn to read. Slowly, he learned words and phrases until, in time he was able to drink from that well himself.

It was a dark day when my dad got a call that there had been an accident on the packing house floor. A man had fallen and hit his head, and was not waking up. My dad, knowing the packing house and everyone in the community, knew something was badly wrong. Shortly after, he learned, with his wife, my mother, that Willard, gentle husband and beloved father- Willard was gone.

You don’t have to know someone well for them to have an impact on your life. You just have to know someone who knew them and loved them, and was impacted by them along the way.

I’m sure I don’t have the narrative all clear here about Willard. It’s a Saturday morning and I am a bit cloudy-minded in a coffee shop, grabbing for something to write about.

Willard was my grandpa, and he loved his kids and his wife and his wife and his simple and hard life.

My mom says he used to laugh about everything.

What I do know is that my grandpa loved a lot.

And I want to be like him, like that.