keepsake

I'm not close to anybody in my family. For the most part they're nice enough people--dysfunctional, definitely, but nice enough--but I don't get on famously with any of my relatives because they're just very different people and we don't have much in common. That's how I was with my paternal grandfather, as well, but he was kind of my favourite inasmuch as it makes sense for me to have a favourite. I wasn't any more compatible with him than anybody else, but he was the most interesting of my relatives. He had the weirdest, coolest stories and did some of the strangest things. He once put his dining room table out of commission for almost a whole year by using it to assemble a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle replica of the Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco. The only big enough surface besides the floor was the dining room table. When he finished, he mounted it on his ceiling (duh!) and there it stayed until the house was cleaned out.

When I was seventeen he died of pancreatic cancer--I'm the oldest grandkid so I have the most memories of him, and since I was older I got to pick something from his house as a keepsake.

So I chose the unicorn.

My entire life my grandfather had this unfinished cross-stitch replica of a unicorn tapestry. Since it was a printed pattern (where the finished picture is printed right on the fabric and you just have to fill it in with all the colours), the image of the unicorn was always there even though it was only about half finished. It just reminds me of him because it was always up on the wall and I always saw it.

When my dad brought it back to Maryland with him, it wasn't in its frame so I could see it had been dated--he started stitching it in the 70s, ten years before I was even born. My dad even found the rest of the supplies (Gramps wasn't a hoarder or anything so I've no idea why he would have saved them), including the original pattern and thread.

But I couldn't bring myself to finish it. The way it 'should' look to me is unfinished. Completing it would be almost blasphemous.

I do want to put ONE stitch in it though, just so it's properly mine.