What Does Legacy Mean to Me?

Pondering your legacy is the privilege of the settled. It’s something people do when they feel content, when they have accomplished some version of their goals. When it happens, it is difficult to avoid the perils of arrogance, hubris, and dishonesty. There are many pitfalls and their occurrence is multiplied when engaging in this practice. Instead, I find it helpful to ponder the legacy of my parents, and my grandparents. What have they left? What was their impact?

In some ways I am their legacy. I am the product of their life and the way they lived it. I was a bystander, most of the time, and a participant, some of the time, in their saga. Probably more so than other people, but maybe similar in impact to my other family members: my brother, my uncles, my aunts, their children and cousins and spouses and parents. The legacy I want to remember today is my grandfather. As a child, he was larger than life to me. Strong, stern, disciplined, he was the glue that bound our family together.

He was a pioneer. He was forged in the fires of World War 2. He met my grandmother in Taiwan. They met at a dance. They got married and had a son, who later became my father. A gifted engineer, he applied to, and was accepted for, Cooper Union’s newly instituted master’s program in New York city. My father was only six years old at the time. According to him, twenty-five plus went into…