Growing up, my brothers and I shared and thus fought over an olive-green wool shirt with clumsy buttons. It was our grandfather’s, from the First World War, and thus a prize. But it was also very scratchy, and thus more often admired than worn. Also, it was too big for any of us.

Our grandfather was a Fleischman whose parents came from East Prussia, where many of his fifteen brothers and sisters had been born. They emigrated in part to avoid the draft under Bismarck, and now here they were, farming in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, and called up to fight against speakers of their native tongue. I don’t believe our grandfather made it past Fort Lewis, in Washington, mustered in and mustered out before he could be shipped overseas.

Still, the olive-green shirt held a kind of romance for all of us. We put it on to play army in the woods, and later on to backpack in the rain and snow of the Cascades. By the time we were through with it, oversized and scratchy as it may have been, the shirt had become a torn rag.

I think the shirt also attracted us because we had not really known our grandfather; he died when the oldest of us was not yet five years old. Even so, my earliest memory, before even the age of two, concerns him. In the living room of our grandparents’ home in Anaheim, California, our grandfather had a favorite chair, a green stuffed rocker. Dark-green, as I recall, and not over-stuffed but lean and scuffed, with a worn, white doily at the head. During one particular family gathering, he left the room briefly and I crawled up into the dark-green chair by myself. When he came back, he made a generous to-do about my being in his place, and I became the center not only of his attention but also of the entire room’s (which is probably why the experience became pressed into my memory).

I wonder now if my climbing into my grandfather’s chair, and my wearing of my grandfather’s shirt, was an attempt to be this person who must have been so kind to us all. In her most recent birthday card to me, my eighty-nine-year-old aunt wrote that a few days after her father had died, I walked over to that green chair and looked at its emptiness in confusion, and that the sight of this made everyone else very sad.

Knowing him in my bones, then, but not really knowing him, I have been an eager collector of stories about my grandfather. Some of these I put in a poem, “Common Ground,” that Garrison Keillor twice read on the radio, which was appropriate, I guess, since I probably had Keillor’s voice in the back of my mind when I wrote it.

The poem begins with an anecdote about his moving to Anaheim to cultivate an orange grove: “‘How’d you learn to grow oranges, Bill?’ / friends said. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I look at what // my neighbor does, and I just do the opposite.’” So ­matter-of-fact. So self-effacing. And yet there is a definite self being asserted.

Long after I wrote that poem, my aunt told me another story. Soon after they had arrived in Anaheim, one Sunday, when the morning service had just let out and people were talking amiably on the steps of the church, a man happened to say he’d heard that up in Portland, they rolled up the sidewalks every evening at six o’clock. “I wouldn’t know,” my grandfather said. “I was always in bed by then.”

Our grandfather had moved to Anaheim because he had married a girl from there, an Urbigkeit, and she had nagged him until he agreed to bring their family out of the rain in Oregon and back to southern California. This was during the Depression, and once they got there the ten-acre orange grove wasn’t enough to support them. So he worked for a laundry during the nights and, in his optimistic way, “Struck it rich in pocket knives.”

But they didn’t completely escape the rain. One winter, the torrents came and the house flooded, and he carried his children, one at a time, waist-deep through the orange grove to higher ground. Perhaps that is the image I like best, a little like those nineteenth-century paintings of Jesus, carrying the lambs in his bosom.

Is it possible that our parents and grandparents still carry us, still enfold us in their arms, long after they’re dead and gone? My mother, who made that trip across the brown floodwaters in his embrace, has now crossed that final flood by herself, and sometimes I feel that my brothers and I are left here in the rapids alone, trying to carry the ones who have in turn been entrusted to us. But that feeling ignores the fact that in having been carried we still are carried, in memory if not in actual, tangible presence. The olive-green shirt, though worn to rags, still rests upon our shoulders, and the dark-green chair, though empty, is full.

Paul Willis is Professor of English at Westmont College and has recently served as poet laureate for the city of Santa Barbara.