The night a huge banging sound came from our bathroom sky light was the night it all started. I had gotten up around eleven or twelve realizing I had forgotten to put in my retainer when a huge "THUMP" came ringing down from the bathroom ceiling. I screamed and my sister came running out of her room with an angry, "It better be worth waking up for this time," look on her face (I've had the habit of over reacting to small, usually imagined, noises coming from the roof in the middle of the night ever since I can remember). She tossed me an evil glare and spat out, "What's your problem?" in an angry whisper, "Something hit the -- " she cut me off, now yelling,

"HIT THE ROOF!" she exclaimed, "YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!"

"Sorry," I said with a lisp, caused by my retainer, fearing my sister's lack of sleep more than roof noises, "It was probably a cat, or -- "

"A REALLY BIG BIRD? YOU'RE UNBELIEVABLE GO BACK TO BED!"

My "really big bird" turned out to be our neighbor's late night basketball game hitting our roof, but I will never forget the ideas that engulfed my imagination the rest of the night. Some over grown hawk pounding in through our skylight ready to devour my entire family and me. However, the whole ordeal made me reconsider my lack of knowledge in coming up with reasonable explanations for things like roof noises and sleepy sisters. In fact, I began to realize that out of the realm of reasonable explanations one had never seemed to enter my brain, or even bothered to peek in. That night, I finally decided that logical thinking might be worth my while and then simply slipped off to sleep, not waking until my six a.m. alarm clock forced me to.

The day went by like any other day. A cold foggy December morning followed by a cold sunny December afternoon, walking from class to class, talking to friends, eating lunch, singing in choir, avoiding geometry homework by slapping down random numbers before the bell rang - a typical day. Then around 5:30 that evening my day stopped being normal and started to morph into that morning's fog.

"Be-Back died this morning," my mom said without a tear in her eye or even a quiver in her voice, like it was simple diner conversation.

"Finally," my sister joked, and without hesitation, we all laughed. What was not revealed that day was that, despite the fact I had never met my great grandfather, I was faced with a choice. I could choose the basketball hitting the roof: a cold bitter alcoholic man had died, "finally." It was no loss to society, after all, he got his name by failing to keep a promise to his granddaughter that he would, "be back." The man who abandoned my mother and beat his children (my grandmother being one of them) was dead; simply a basketball hitting the roof. On the other hand, I could choose the hawk: my history had died. Here was a man who took a bullet to the head for his country in World War II and I had never stopped to hear the story. A man, who lived through the 1920's and the Great Depression, had died leaving only the trace of drunkenness and despair. I would never know if he listened to ragtime or played jazz or even if he could swing dance, my past was gone and I had watched it go by even with a little eagerness, never realizing what I was losing.

In the end, my great grandfather, no matter what life he chose to lead, was a person. That simple fact led me to turn away from my endeavor for logical explanations that I had begun the night before he died. In the whole realm of logical explanations, there is really none for the long coming death of this distant relative. In fact, the idea of a logical explanation for any thing might even be illogical in itself. The fact that, we as human beings, can muster up enough energy to come up with an explanation that is in some way satisfying to us should be sufficient.

My great grandfather may not have been a huge part of my life, but he has taught me some important lessons. Every human being must have his story, but it is up to him to decide what kind of story he wants it to be. We all hope to achieve the fairy tale ending that Snow White or Cinderella had, but seldom do we get it. I suppose that at one point my great grandfather dreamt of that same blissful ending that would send him well on his way to happily ever after, but a few wrong turns too many and it was gone. However, the most important things he taught me are summed up in the following two "rules":

• Be careful what choices you make; avoid messing up so bad that you hurt every one in your life for years to come.
• Do not regret the mistakes you do make: forgive, forget, and move on just as you would do for another person or have another person do for you.

I know these two "life rules" only because of my great grandfather's mistakes. He first made the mistake of blaming other people for his hard life. Then when he ended up hurting others with his bitter demeanor, he could not turn around and forgive himself, therefore excluding himself from the forgiveness of others.

Wht makes my great grandfather the most interesting person I have never met? In all honesty, I would say his humanity. Here was a man who had never said a kind word to those who loved him, a man who broke his wife's heart and his children's spirits. A man who in his last days was barley even recognized as a human at all. Yet some how at the end of it all he was human enough to die, human enough to be missed by the few who had bothered to love him; human enough to have lived.