This Is Your Reminder to Remember Their Voices

Happy Birthday George Edward Walker, Jr.

There are hours of my grandfather’s voice on my phone.

I haven’t listened to any of them yet and it’s been nine years since he died. I still haven’t pressed play. I don’t know exactly why. Maybe I’m not ready to hear how alive he sounds. Maybe I know that once I start, something will shift in me that I can’t unshift. Maybe I’m saving it. Maybe I’m afraid of it. Probably all of that, braided together the way grief usually is. Like vacation hair.

I’m glad I recorded him.

He was a storyteller who never needed occasion. He just needed a room, or a porch, or a long drive with nowhere particular to be. He told stories without thinking about it, without needing applause. And I, someone who has spent his life chasing stories, had the good sense to pull out my phone and let it listen even when I wasn’t sure I was listening the right way myself.

I didn’t know him as well as I wish I had. That’s a sentence I’ve heard people say at bedsides and gravesites, and now it belongs to me too. He died nine years ago and there are questions I never got to ask. There are versions of him, the young man, the father, adventurer, the person before I existed or my mama, that I will never fully know. That’s the honest thing about family. We usually only get one angle of a person, and by the time we think to ask for more, the window has sometimes already closed.

But I have his voice. I have him talking. I’ll make something of it. I don’t know yet what that something is, but I know it exists because I pressed record.