Relative Beginnings 1: Big Bang

Chapter 3

At the top of the stairs I immediately took in the odor of my grandfather's desk. It always put a smile on my face no matter how the day was going downstairs. There was a healthy blend of oak and years of pipe tobacco blended together. All of it reminded me of my brilliant and talented grandfather.

I threw myself into the office chair to get a little roll out if it. Another little way to squeeze some fun out of the work day (for me at least) and then awkwardly side walked the chair back in front of my computer.

Instead of diving back into emails and revising the marketing plan for the quarter, I waved my fingers together behind the back of my head and leaned all the way back in my chair. Ian and I modified all of the tilt stops and added center of gravity weights in our chairs so that one could almost lay back with their feet pointing straight up in the air. I was now looking up at the ceiling.

I stared a the poster of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out at me and smiled even more. I had an affinity for the great scientist since Albert and my grandfather's name, Alfred, were so close together but they also seemed to display a mix of brilliance, humility and humor.

Thinking about my grandfather, I began to reflect back on memories of what it was like to grow up in his presence. Whenever I came over to visit he was always in his study sorting through piles of paper while also slowly typing away on his computer. I remember all of the versions he went through growing up in 80's and 90's. His first PC at home was a Commodore 64 and it wasn't lost on us that Captain Kirk was an endorser.

There were as an early Mac (Apple IIGS), then in the early 90's Standford gave their physics professors IBM Thinkpad 700C. From there I began to lose track since he was always staying on top of the ever evolving computing power that was available.

I remember hearing whispers of how my grandfather was working with a guy named Sern, or so that's what I thought in my early years. I laughed to myself at how young and naive I was. I was quite embarrassed to learn in high school that he was working on the now famous CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland.

My smile quickly faded as the memory forced me to reflect on how the particle accelerator was linked to his disappearance. Grandma had told the family that he was called into his office late at night on the weekend. She had picked up the phone first around 1AM and recognized the voice on the other end of the line, but my grandfather had never told her who it was. The only link was that he was helping with the particle accelerator work.

She told the family that he quickly threw on some clothes, brushed his hair, threw some papers in his satchel, grabbed one of his laptops and scurried off to the office. She always cried at that memory because her last interaction with him was one of annoyance over him being called into the office on the weekend at such a late hour. She never even got to say she loved him. My heart always ached when she recounted the story. What an awful way to remember your last exchange with the love of your life.

I shook the image of my heart-broken grandmother out of my mind. I tried to remember exactly what I remembered about his later work. I knew it had something to do with helping to complete some aspect of the CERN particle accelerator. I remember my grandfather pouring over sketches and diagrams when I came to see him before his disappearance. He always seemed distracted and his eyes would go vacant during conversations like he was in a different dimension within his mind.

I blew out my breathe in a deep sigh and forced myself to think of happier times with him. I remembered my days as a little boy. He would let me play at the base of his massive oak desk with the carefully carved features. I would be surrounded in a cloud of pipe smoke and I felt protected in that carcinogenic bubble for some reason. I felt perfectly loved and protected in that space.

Eventually he would get up and lean over his desk to look down at me. "Ready to really play, Ethan my boy," he would say with a smile and a wink.

I'd jump up and down with excitement as he would take my hand and walk me out to the backyard and watch me play in the single, large oak tree in the back yard. This tree was massive and old. My grandfather would say it was millions of years old. As old as the earth itself. The trunk was massive to me. I always thought it was a thousand feet tall and almost as round.

I only had the gumption to climb the first few branches and after using some of the thick bark as hand holds to get to the first branch,. Even after the first few branches it seemed there were a hundred more to get to the top. During heavy wind storms it was the only tree in the neighborhood that barely moved. At times heavy branches would fall but in the end it seemed to be built of steel.

I could feel the smile grow on my face again as I remember my grandfather shouting words of encouragement as I scrambled up the tree. He would shout out suggestions of where to go or where to dangle. My favorite treat was when I would dangle from the first branch and then drop into the sure arms of my grandfather.

'Ahh, the days of feeling safe and loved,' I thought. Then I remembered that almost a decade ago he disappeared from our lives and the world seem to go dark with him.