In Honor of Rod

Recently, one of our employees passed away. He was more than an employee really, he was a family friend. And we will miss him deeply. I'm speaking at his funeral tomorrow and I want to post my speech here. I know none of you know Rod (well, not most of you anyway) but at least by reading this you will know a little more about him, and what a great guy he was. So here goes, in honor of Charles Rodman Crawford, otherwise known as "Grandpa."

Hello, my name is Jill Parish and I had the pleasure of working with Rod. I'm going to try and keep this as upbeat as possible because everyone in this room knows that Rod was not a morose and sad person. Rod was a laugher. He was always laughing about something, usually his own bad jokes. And Rod did tell jokes. Really bad ones. He would always come and visit me in my office, which is at the end of a long corridor, and I would tell him as he was walking down the corridor "don't come in here if you have a bad joke to tell me." He would laugh, come in anyways and tell me a bad joke. Then, he would laugh like it was the funniest thing ever. His laughter made me laugh so I used to end up laughing at his joke anyway. I'm guessing that was his master plan.
Rod and I shared an unusual bond. We "got" each other somehow. He always went out of his way to make me happy and it worked, I was always happy to see him. When my office was subzero and the heater kept shorting out, he figured a way to make it work. He brought me Valentine cards (don't tell Donna:)) and treats for the holidays. When he discovered that my favorite candy was those marshmallow peeps you get at Easter, he would find one for every holiday and bring them to me. He brought me Valentine peeps, Christmas peeps, Halloween peeps, you name the holiday, he found peeps and brought them to me. We were always disappointed that they never came out with a 4th of July Peep. How easy would it be to sell a star red, white and blue marshmallows! What an amazing guy he was.
To be honest, it is strange for me to call Rod by his name, because I did not call him Rod. I called him grandpa. Not because he had any relation to me, or because he was old enough to be my grandpa (though I did enjoy teasing him about this) but because one day Rod was telling me a story about his grandsons. These were my favorite kind of stories for him to tell me because it was so obvious when he would tell these stories how much love he had for his grandkids. It didn't matter if he was telling me they won an Olympic gold medal, or just that they finished their green beans the night before, he would tell the story with such pride and he would smile so big, it was so clear how much he loved those kids. Anyway, he was telling me this story, which admittedly, I don't remember all of, but it ended with one of his grandsons yelling "grandpa" in a loud, rather urgent voice. It was a funny story, I know that, because I laughed, and not just because he was laughing, and said from now on I was going to address him by loudly saying "grandpa." One time, my brother's daughters were in the hardware store and I called Rod "grandpa." The youngest one looked at him and then at me and asked him "are you our grandpa too?" with complete confusion. We thought that was pretty funny.
The nickname Grandpa stuck because every time I would call him "grandpa" he laughed. And I loved to make Grandpa laugh. He loved being a grandpa and he loved responding to that name. It worked for both of us. When I think of Grandpa, I try to not be sad. I think of the stories he told about his grandkids. About how much he loved being a grandpa. And about how much he loved to make people laugh and smile. I think that's what he would have liked. He would have wanted us all to think of the funny times our life paths crossed each other and to remember him then. And then he would want us to tell a bad joke. And then he would want us to laugh at that joke, to make the other person laugh, of course.
In conclusion, I have a bad Halloween joke to tell in honor of Grandpa:
"What do birds give out on Halloween night?"
"Tweets"

Loves to you always grandpa.