Wearing My Grandfather’s Coat on Samhain

My father’s father, Len Swiss, died twenty-five years ago this Christmas. When we went through his things a few weeks later I found that his coat fit me. I’ve had it in the back of my closet all these years; it has a few small tears that need sewing up, one missing button and one broken one. It’s been one of those sewing projects I never got around to. (Not that I have any skill at tailoring, but I can sew on a button or mend a small tear. Or, heck, if I were a more organized person I could find a friend with better sewing skills or just drop a few dollars at a dry cleaners with a seamster on site, but such small projects tend to be endlessly put off.)

I don’t know why it came into my mind recently, but I pulled it out today. I didn’t wake up this morning with the intention of doing any ancestor work, but in magic as in poetry the rule is simple: work with the inspiration that appears. The tears were smaller than I remembered, not bad enough to keep me from wearing it until they’re fixed.

I was a few weeks shy of twenty-one when he died, and he was a few weeks shy of seventy-nine — my birthday is the day after his, and my father’s is five days before, we sometimes had triple family birthday parties. I knew him as the family patriarch, father to my father, my uncle, and my aunt, grandfather to my cousin, my brother, and me, even as I saw him worn down in the last years of his life by caring for my grandmother through her serious health problems. He knew me as an infant, a boy, a teen, but never really as a man.

I remember him in this coat, just barely, a few mental snapshots.

Maybe I left that coat in the closet because I had to grow into it. Of course we’ve grown into very different people; he was father of three, a traditional Polish Catholic, a career officer in the Baltimore City Fire Department, where I’m a single Zen Pagan dilettante. And yet as my father’s father he was a big part of my model of manhood. His gentleness, good humor, readiness to express emotion and yet maintain a calm strength…I like to think I’ve grown into those qualities enough to wear his coat.

You can keep up with “The Zen Pagan” by subscribing via RSS or e-mail.

If you do Facebook, you might choose to join a group on “Zen Paganism” I’ve set up there. And don’t forget to “like” Patheos Pagan and/or The Zen Pagan over there, too.