Remembering James Frank Mikes

One week ago I made an unplanned weekend trip to Chicago to attend my grandfather’s funeral. James Frank Mikes, my mother’s father, died on 16 January 2008. He was 83 old.

Standing by the gravesite, huddled close to one another to defend against a below zero Chicago winter day, we watched two young men from the Great Lakes Naval Station stand at attention through a recording of taps and then slowly (probably due as much to frozen fingers as ceremonial protocol) lift the US flag from my grandfather’s coffin and fold it into a tight-cornered triangle.

It was one of those moments that reminded me of how little I really knew about his pre-grandfather life. My 29 years overlapped with the last third of his. As one of 19 grandchildren (plus 2 spouses and 1 great grandchild) personal time with my grandfather wasn’t really a part of our family culture. .

I wasn’t there for his tour of service in the navy during World War II. I didn’t know him or my grandmother during their season as childhood neighbors, high school classmates, and newlyweds living in a dorm at the University of Illinois – prior to the arrival of my nine aunts and uncles. Back in grade school, I did get to experience a small taste of his 30+ years directing his family’s construction business. I remember chasing my brother through his office with its big metal desk, drafting supplies and the smell of sawdust… but that is when he was well on the road to retirement – not during the years that my mother remembers of seven day work weeks and heading back to the office after the family dinner.

I am thankful for what I did experience during his grandfather years. His quiet but quirky sense of humor displayed through witty captions on Polaroid snapshots that decorated an entire room in their lake house. His incredible skills as a contractor and builder – evidenced through the extensive remodeling jobs he carried out at all our family members’ homes. The feeling of the scratchy polyester beard he wore each year on Christmas Eve to round out his Santa suit and pillow-padded belly. The slight smile on his face and the light in his eyes as he quietly watched our family’s lake house antics from his favorite positions in the living room recliner or the captain’s chair on the pontoon boat.

I do have one memory of my grandfather that is all my own. Several years ago, when I was back from living in Kenya and trying to decide what I should do next, he pulled me aside and said, with a tone of urgency, “You do what it is that you want to do”. Simple words, but profoundly meaningful coming from a man who more than half a century earlier made a reluctant choice to join the family construction business and to not finish the last few months of his engineering degree. He was very aware of how that one decision to not finish university and pursue his own professional dreams had redirected his and his family’s life – not in a way that destroyed them - but in a way that definitely robbed them all of some joy over the years.

Listening to my aunt and uncle’s eulogy at my grandfather’s funeral – a humorous reenactment of a conversation between God and the angel charged with brining him home to heaven - I was struck by how even the parts of my grandfather’s story that I never knew have shaped my mother's family - the foundation upon which my own childhood was built. I’m not sure how well I will follow his advice “to do what it is I want to do” – that involves actually knowing what I want - which is usually the hardest part for me. However, from the story of his life, I do know that the promise of things being worked together for a greater good is a true one - and that is a firm foundation for constructing my own future.