If “leaving one’s mark” means to have an effect on something, I want to do it like my dad did. He had a way of affecting people and places throughout his life. The effect he had on me, even since his passing almost 30 years ago, has stayed within me in so many ways.
He was a very positive person and tended to look on the bright side of things. He wasn’t a Pollyanna, as I often am, but just seemed to always see the glass as half full. He always saw possibilities where I often did not.
Anyway, years later, after he was gone, my first grandchild was born. Named after me, she was our treasure and we felt happiness just to have her in our lives. She was a sweet-tempered, loving little person and we would always show her pictures of our family in frames all over the house. My dad was in many of them. When she would see him, she would get a look across her face that seemed to be like recognition. It was as if she knew him. It left an impression on me and I wondered about it a lot.
My father was a masonry and general contractor and built buildings in our community. He would usually do one large project a year along with smaller jobs, enough to keep his permanent employees busy, year-round.
One summer, there were no large projects to be bid on and he was doing small jobs. He started pouring sidewalks that year, all over our city. I think it must have started with a job or two, but then it blossomed into new sidewalk after sidewalk, all over our town.
At each end of a new sidewalk, he would press his “stamp” into the wet concrete. It was the name of his company with our surname in it. When people saw the work he had done, they could contact him, and ask him to do their sidewalk as well. That summer and several other summers I would walk to the public high school and take classes. All along the route, I would see his stamp. I would take different routes and count them along the way. There were a lot of them!
When my grand-daughter was about 4 years old, we would walk in the neighborhood where I grew up. One day I pointed out the sidewalk stamp and we decided to count them along the way. As we were walking, she stopped me and said, “Grandma, I know why great-grandpa put his stamp on the sidewalk.” “Really?” I asked. And she looked up at me and said, “It was so that I would find them.” I looked into her sweet little face and said that she must be right. And and as we walked on, I thought to myself, “He definitely left his mark.”