The Painting from a Traveler—Memories of My Grandfather

#WhatIsThisStoryHouse

Bright red petals blooming in the deep navy night sky. They flash open wide for a moment, then blur, fade, and vanish in the blink of an eye.
A painting of fireworks hangs in the entryway of my parents' house.

Since no one in my family is stylish enough to have oil painting as a hobby, I once asked my late grandfather how it had come to be in our home.
"Oh, that? A man came knocking on our door in the middle of a stormy night a long time ago. I let him stay the night, and he said he was a traveler who painted pictures, so he sent it to me as a thank-you for letting him stay."

I thought it sounded like a story that was too good to be true. It sounded like something out of a Japanese folktale...

But in reality, my grandfather had a strangely friendly side. Because of that, our bookshelf was lined with dictionaries bought from door-to-door salesmen, and in front of the family altar, there were landscape photos displayed that he had bought from someone who claimed to be studying photography.

I also have a few things at my parents' house that were given to me by salesmen who said, "This is for your grandchild." A set of one hundred colored pencils, an imitation necklace, and shiny gold and silver origami paper.

My grandfather was an easygoing man.
He once had his name completely butchered on a happi coat made for a neighborhood association festival.
It was a total mistake, like writing "Tasuke" instead of "Takashi."
But my grandfather just wore it with a smile, saying, "Tasuke is a nice name, too. Oh well."

The most surprising thing, above all else, was that one time.
I think every elementary school district has that one "famous suspicious person." Near my elementary school, there was a man who dressed in flashy clothes and handed out candy to children in front of the school gate, and our teachers would warn us, "Do not take anything from that man."

However, one day, I saw my grandfather and that very man standing on the side of the road, chatting away happily!!

When I got home, I asked him with a pounding heart.
"Grandpa, are you friends with that man?"
"Hmm, he passes by our house often. I just talk to him sometimes, wondering how he's doing."
It was a vague answer.

But my grandfather also had a side where he would fall silent if the topic of war came up, saying, "I don't want to talk about that."
As a child, I always felt that spending his youth during wartime had cast a dark shadow over his life.

Come to think of it, he would sometimes say strange things out of the blue.
"If you always keep a thick notebook in your chest pocket, it might save you if you get shot by a handgun. Many people have been saved that way," he would say with a serious face. I don't think it was from his own experience, though.

When my grandfather passed away, so many people gathered that I couldn't even make sense of it, and at the funeral hall, people were reminiscing and laughing in various corners.
But as I looked at the funeral hall lined with large floral wreaths, I suddenly felt like my grandfather might just sit up in his coffin and say, "It's okay, it's okay, you don't have to go through all this trouble. Just bury me somewhere around here."

Postscript
After returning to my parents' house, I casually took a picture of that painting with my smartphone.
And what I saw in the photo was... a "painting of poppies."

Oh my goodness. Because the house was dim, I had mistaken it for a painting of fireworks until I was an adult, even though it clearly looked like flowers.
My grandfather's memories were also hazy, and I've started to lose confidence in whether many of these episodes actually happened.
But the painting of poppies that he said he received from a traveler is certainly still there.

I had shelved this piece after submitting it to an essay contest a while ago, but
I thought this was a perfect opportunity, so I decided to submit it to #WhatIsThisStoryHouse.