Just like any other day, I carefully carried the ham and cheese omelet to the table and set it down.  I wasn’t quite sure what exactly was in a ham and cheese omelet, but I didn’t plan on eating it anyway; this was Papa’s favorite thing to get for breakfast.

I sat down at the table across from him, eagerly awaiting my own drink.  Papa thanked me and then began to eat it with such poise that one would think he believed himself to be at a fancy dinner.  He ate much more dignified than myself, hunched over my plate while shoveling bacon into my mouth.  The waitress - the same waitress as last time, and all of the Sundays before - stopped at our table and put several glasses down on our table.  For Papa, a glass of water with no ice.  For me, a tall glass of diet soda.  It was very unfitting for breakfast, but nine-year-old me didn’t care.  As I ate scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast, I sipped ice-cold Diet Coke like it was lunch.  This was a pretty typical Sunday morning.

Then Papa, with his big, veiny hand, pointed at the glass and the straw and said, “I want to show you a neat trick you can do with that.”

Really? my childish mind thought.  But how?  How can you do tricks with a glass and a straw?  Does he know how to turn it upside down, like a really thick milkshake?  Is it a magic trick?  What is he planning?  Papa was a smart man - this I knew - but I couldn’t conjure any idea of how a magic act could be done with a cup and a straw.  He put his own cup in the center of the table.

“The thing that keeps things like raindrops together,” he explained, in his deep storyteller’s voice, “is called ‘surface tension’.  Water molecules - and other liquid molecules - like to…” He did a gesture with his hands, showing a couple of objects colliding and staying together.  “ … stick to each other.  A big, heavy fluid is going to be weighed down, and the pull of gravity will be stronger than surface tension and cohesion, so it won’t stick together.”

Papa lifted his straw, half-full of water, out of his glass.  Almost as quickly as it rose, the water inside dropped out into the glass, so that it was completely empty when it was out of the water.

“But air has weight too, so it will push the water out of the straw, so that it can expand into the straw, alongside gravity.  But… do you know what happens when the air is not expanding or pushing the water out?”
I had a growing feeling that Papa was about to reveal the trick he spoke of.

“Go ahead,” he prompted me.  “Put your finger on the top of your straw, and then pull it out of your drink.  See what happens!”

As Papa watched patiently, I put my pointer finger over the top of the straw so that it was completely airtight.  I then cautiously lifted it out of the drink, when something amazing happened.
While I gazed in awe at what I had accomplished, Papa confirmed that what I was seeing was indeed real.
“The liquid stays… inside… of the straw.  Even though gravity is pulling on it… pressure, cohesion, and surface tension are all causing it to stay in the straw and defy gravity.”

My grandfather - or, as I always liked to call him, “Papa” - was a very unique man.  Though in the latter years of his life he was a lawyer in cases concerning plane crashes, he was an aviator at heart.  The bald, scrawny, thick-eyebrowed old gentleman wore a thick, blue pilot’s jacket and bifocal glasses along with his fairly-modern tennis shoes.  He had an attorney’s orderliness in his conduct; he would use formal language in nearly all of his conversations, to the point of completely eschewing the word “get” and all of its variations from his vocabulary.  His schedule was orderly as well.  Papa attended church every Sunday he was physically able to do so.  However, he could also relax and tell jokes when not on the job, ranging from intellectual humor to toilet humor.  Papa loved his grandchildren, especially myself and my little brother, often going out of his way to make us happier.  I don’t think I really knew a more charismatic and wise person in my life.

This made it all so much more painful on that day he had a stroke.  As Dad and I were making the final preparations to leave for Kansas City on our family vacation, I heard a faint “help” from the living room.  Half-convinced it was my imagination, I ran upstairs to find Papa leaning on a table, shaking as if about to collapse.  I cried out for Dad to come help; I had no clue what to do.  Papa, still halfway conscious, instructed me to support him by putting my arms under his shoulders and laying him down on the floor.  Dad arrived upstairs and helped.  As he set my grandfather down on the carpet, I nervously fetched a pillow he had sewn up a few months ago for him to rest his head on.

“I’m… I’m too weak…” he groaned, before his eyes became wide and his body went limp.  For a few minutes I feared that he was dead.  I called 911 and the ambulance arrived shortly thereafter.  A friendly paramedic used a defibrillator to stabilize Papa’s condition.  Apparently his heart was not stopped but beating too fast, and he would need a pacemaker installed after a long time in a hospital.  The paramedic had a bit of light banter with Papa as he loaded him onto a stretcher and carted him outside to the ambulance, assuring us that he would be alright.  Dad and I continued preparing to leave, feeling relieved that Papa was in good hands at the hospital, but not completely without worry.

Papa had a uniquely bright mind.  As an attorney, he methodically deconstructed airplane accidents and presented the facts before the court in a businesslike manner.  He was said to be able to fix anything, from ripped pillows to faulty doors to malfunctioning aircraft - an invaluable skill as a Vietnam War pilot, where he worked around much equipment which could become dangerously defective at any time.  Not only could he fix anything, he could fly anything, from a small propeller plane to a hulking bomber.  The greatest show of his skill, however, was not over Vietnam; Papa was involved in a spy plane program, in which he would fly over such countries as Cambodia and Laos to report troop movements and retrieve crashed pilots before they were discovered.  For both his service as a pilot and a spy, he attained the rank of lieutenant colonel.  Papa’s expertise shone in other ways as well.  For instance, he helped design submarines, or at least that’s what I’ve heard.  During his time in Vietnam, he noticed that a large number of airplanes were parked too closely together on an airfield, and advised his superiors to space the planes further apart so that if the base were bombed, the planes would not all explode.  He was ignored, and when the base was bombed, the explosions of the crowded planes caused all the planes around them to explode as well.  Papa was sent to assist in cleaning up the very preventable damage, and as he spent all that time in the wreckage, he was exposed to Agent Orange.  The effects were not immediately felt, but the toxins he was exposed to would eventually cause his health to deteriorate.

Of course, at the time, I did not know any of this.  I just knew that Papa, unfortunately, was an older man, well into his eighties and still taking time off his lifespan by working in the complex world of flight adjusting and aviation law.  And no time before had this been more apparent than the day I saw him in the hospital after getting back from Kansas City.  Though he lay in a bed on the third floor of the hospital, Papa had never looked lower.  Dad cautiously attempted conversation with him, but to my pleasant surprise, he chatted back with him as he normally would.  But he couldn’t speak as he did before - the entire right side of his mouth was numb and didn’t work very well.  This was because, as the nurse explained, Papa had survived a minor stroke, which impaired his ability to function in the right half of his body.  Even if he couldn’t move as well, and even though his heartbeat needed to be kept in check, he surprised us by attempting to get out of his bed several times, setting off a loud beeping noise that prompted him to get back in bed.  As if afflicted with amnesia as well, he frantically asked for his blue jacket several times.
This was a very integral aspect of Papa’s personality that I’d failed to look for: his stubbornness.  As Grandma told me, he didn’t like being away from home or being told what to do, so he was averse to hospitals - so much so that he made an offhand joke to Dad about using the car to crash through the third-story wall to escape like in some sort of bizarre action movie.  This trait, his unflinching stubbornness, must have been the reason he kept working as a lawyer all these years, unretired in his mid-eighties: he simply refused to admit defeat or accept something ending because of something out of his own hands.  But his very health was out of his hands, afflicted by the stupidity of a superior officer those many decades ago, and he could not stop the inevitable.  Perhaps he always wanted to get his way because his condition was caused by another person refusing to do things according to his instructions?

Those last few months with Papa in this world were stressful.  I loved him as I’d never loved him before, and in turn I was constantly on alert for potential signs of trouble.  I winced whenever he had to get up from a chair, or lift an object, or do any sort of physical activity.  Ever since he got back from the hospital, he walked with a limp, his voice was wheezy and high-pitched, and his hair had gone totally white and thin.  His dexterity was compromised, despite all of those sessions in physical therapy.  His relationship with Grandma became strained as his declining condition irritated him more and more.  I became on edge around him, for I thought that at any moment he could have an even bigger stroke and I would have to work fast to make sure he got medical attention.  I became paranoid of all sounds that came from upstairs; every footfall sounded like a person falling on the floor.

One day, when we were having a big family dinner with potatoes and everything else, Papa came along with Grandma.  He carried with him a battered green metal box with military-looking markings on the lid.  When I finished the insides of the potato and Dad told me I could eat the skin, Papa recalled a humorous rhyme: “I come from Donegal; we eat potatoes, skin and all!”.  Once dinner was over, he opened the box and showed us various solar navigation instruments and pieces of equipment from World War II.  As he told us of the stories behind each object, I felt that the life had returned to him.  I felt, like I did as a child, that he would remain a permanent fixture in my life, like he would last forever.

That was obviously not the case.

The wake was held a week after the school play.  Opening night, I learned, was the night that Papa passed away.  Friends and family showed up.  The casket was closed, surrounded by pictures of the wise old man at all the stages of his long life.  Many pictures were in black and white.  I met many relatives I didn’t know I had and would probably never meet again.  They told me stories of his past life.  I learned then, several days after the man himself was gone, that Papa was much more than a wise old man with outlandish stories: he was a spy, a mechanic, a lieutenant colonel with a neat outfit, a loving father and husband, a true believer, a fixer of everything, a planner, a builder, a hero.  Before I rushed off to sample the buffet and escape my emotional pain, I glanced at the closed casket where I knew he slept, thinking If only I had known all of this when you were with us; we’d have so much more to talk about.

About a day afterwards, in the military graveyard, I got to see Papa for the last time.  As a pallbearer, I also got to help Papa move one last time, and help him lie down one final time.  I prayed from the bottom of my heart upon his casket, then walked back to the car with tears about to burst from my eyes, faintly imagining Papa whispering “goodbye” from beyond the grave.  I remembered all of the times at the funeral and the wake when I almost cried, but nothing happened.  What kind of monster are you? I thought to myself.  You stand there, like an emotionless husk, while that legendary hero - who just so happened to be your grandfather - is no longer with you.  Aren’t you even a little bit sad?

But then, a thought occurred to me: Yes, I am sad.  But I’m also happy, for in his life he stood as a larger-than-life hero, only to be restrained by fate in the last year of his time on Earth; now that he was in Heaven, immortalized in all of our hearts, he is once again the great man that I admired - no, admire.

I felt closer to Papa than I had ever felt before, even if he wasn’t physically with me in this world.  I felt closer to him, for I wanted to further immortalize his greatness by aspiring to emulate him, by forging a bright future of my own, and dedicating my life to the same kindness he showed me, with a mind kindled by the spark of Papa’s own bright mind.

When I was given his old collection of foreign money to keep safe, it was a good start.

Now that my gray coat is ripped at the elbows, I’m sometimes tempted to get a blue jacket to go with my glasses, so I could look like a very wise man.