When my grandfather was a Freshman in college, he was awarded a golden glove after winning the featherweight division of the All-Campus Boxing Championship. The best part is that he was unopposed throughout the entire tournament and THAT was because the challenger who had been scheduled to fight him showed up weighing over his listed class.
And though that might’ve been the case, I like to imagine that there was more to it than just that. Why hadn’t any other featherweight fighter signed up for the tournament and why did Pops’s one chance for opposition decide to pack on the pounds until he was disqualified? Maybe because he looked into Pops’s eyes and saw something.
The same something that forced three cold-blooded murderers to spare his life that day out on the water when they could’ve just as easily shot him and went on poaching deer to their sick black hearts’ content. And maybe that’s because the only thing scarier than a monster is a truly good man. God knows it’s a lot rarer.
And then when I was five and the state deemed my young drug-addled mother unfit to raise a child, it was Pops who took me in and treated me like a son. And in all that time, almost nothing even remotely scary happened to me, which is why I rarely write about it.
One thing of note, though: Pops thought it was awesome that, at five-years-old, I was reading “whole books” (sure, they were Encyclopedia Brown novels but I never said I was Good Will Hunting). For this reason, he made going to the bookstore our weekly thing and he never said no if I asked him to buy me a new novel because I finished the previous one too quickly.
This tradition persisted throughout high school and well into college, long after my preferred authors had gone from R.L. Stine to the likes of Stephen King and Brett Easton Ellis, which means Pops is pretty much the sole reason I’m sitting here typing these words. He was also a secret badass who I once watched flip off a demon.
What’s the fondest memory you have of YOUR grandfather?
Exactly. I win that game. 
