A thousand memories line the shelves in Grandpa's room; trinkets from his time spent in the military and the places he has traveled to, pictures of people he met along the way and books, thousands of books in hundreds of languages. They rest like guards to the pictures he has collected through the years of people he will never forget; there is a blonde woman with a sever looking face and the kindest eyes wrapped in the arms of man with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, a baby resting on her hip. There is a young, mousy couple surrounded by books and clearly in love, a dark stocky man reclining in the arms of an older gentleman, a soft look in their eyes; a gypsy couple dances at their wedding while a tall blonde man with Grandpa Ed's features plays guitar. There are smiles on all their faces. They are happy. content with their lives.

There is a picture of Grandpa and a blonde man he fought with in the war after they got their tattoos from Great-Grandpa father. The man died in the war a month latter, he never got to see his rockets fly. Grandpa told me that their tattoos meant "immortality stretched on the cross of death", a reminder that all things are mortal.

As much as these pictures mean to Grandpa his most precious ones are kept in his bedroom, where he has been confined since the illness took hold of his lungs, his body unable to fight against the infection that set in to the prosthesis ports. The loss of his other leg broke something in my Grandfather, who had always been constantly in motion. As the illness has spread he has begun to confuse reality more and more with the stories he told me as a child. It is here that there are more pictures of the blonde man, this time of him before the war, sitting surrounded by pieces of rockets, a dopey smile on his face. It is this man who has become the Alphonse of Grandpa's fairy tales, an indestructible suit of armor. who was always by his side.

It is the same for the woman in fatigues sitting on a jeep with a wrench in hand, grease covering her from head to toe and smile that could eclipse the sun spread across her face. She was a nurse in the Korean war who was better with a wrench than a scalpel and happier to boot; this is his Winry. There is a woman holding a small child with dark hair and blue eyes and beautiful smile below the most trusting eye's. They stand outside a deli in New York that the woman's husband owns.

There is an American solider he met in the second war with a bright smile and sad, lonely eyes. Maes Hughes, in the flesh only in this story, the true story there are no pictures of a sweet little girl for him to brandish as weapon and armor. General Hewett's wife died giving child birth on a snowy winter night, ten years before Grandpa ever met him. The General told Grandpa stories that never failed to make him cry, of a young major and a bottle of rum and a gun with no one to stop the guilt of following orders, of surviving.

When the General died he left Grandpa all his pictures, "for his collection", he would joke, and it is from these that the paintings began. They are of the young Major, a man of mixed decent, with his mother's pale skin and his father's dark, slanting eye's beneath a shock of raven hair. Shining obsidian wreathed in black lace that seem to convey everything and yet nothing at all.

There are thousands of paintings, each of them different, each of them showing a different side of the man, and I now that this is the person who truly captured Grandpa's heart. He may have loved Grandma Rose, but it was the Colonel he really belonged to.

As I reach out to close Grandpa Edward's eyes I send up a prayer that his soul finds his Bastard Colonel and lives happily ever after like the warrior in his stories.

There will be a prequel and a sequel if I get enough reviews to prove interest in them.