"Poor Little Me"

It's a rainy, slow Sunday, made ever more so by the brakes of waiting; a delivery appointment for our long coveted Tempurpedic bed scheduled to arrive between 1pm-5pm. With our doors removed from their hinges and furniture carefully pushed aside, there is nothing more to do except stew in anticipation.

Time for a good read, and while in house-mode, an errant pile of documents reveals a treasure: my long-deceased grandfather's hand-written auto-biography, "Poor Little Me", penned politely in March of 1926, when he was just fourteen years old. Having re-read it for the first time since my own adolescence, I finally realize its true value. I never knew Grandpa Henry, he died when my own father was only 10 years old.

"Oops" - Detail - by meredith cutler

It's a sweet, genuine read, a true time-capsule, revealing a boy who aspired to become a mechanical engineer or draftsman; with a special ambition to design airplane engines in what he predicted to be known as "the motor age". I have decided I should at least make an attempt to adapt the carefully pencilled script into an illustrated book format. After all, Henry wondered aloud whether "an autobiography of a fourteen year old boy would sell as well [as that] of one of our famous men?"