Growing up my grandfather was a mystical creature.

Because he lived in California and we were being raised in Massachusetts, we barely knew him.

But the stories my mother told us were colorful and spellbinding.

His mother, my great grandmother, was a Duchess, who lived in a palace. She fell in love with the barber, who came to cut her father’s hair. Her father wasn’t pleased and gave the poor girl an ultimatum. If you marry him, you will lose your title, your home and your inheritance.

She married him anyway.

From his father, my grandfather learned to cut hair, although he was more interested in chemistry and dreamed of creating a miracle cream. When he was sixteen, he boarded a ship to America, alone, not knowing the language. He made a few friends on board, also from Sicily. They offered to help him start a cosmetic company but he was wary of taking money from strangers.

After marrying my grandmother and fathering four children, the depression hit. Convinced that he could make more money in California than the Northeast, he packed his bags and promised to send money home.

And send money home he did.

Enough money to educate my three uncles in schools such as Harvard, Middlebury and Syracuse. Enough money to send my mother wads of cash through the mail, so we would be the best dressed children in the Easter Parade. Enough money to take summer vacations by the shore.

And finally at age ninety-eight, my grandfather decided to spend some time with his grandchildren.

There was no question of him living with my family. He wanted peace and quiet, so he rented a small studio and moved in with a few belongings, his monk robes (he was a monk of the third order) his prayer books, his Bible and his vitamins.

In my mother’s basement, he stored an assortment of chemicals and a full set of Mad Magazines.

My grandfather was a very ambitious man. He started his day with an hour of prayer. He promised me and my sister, Martha, a dollar, if we stayed with him and got through all of the praying. I folded after twenty minutes.

Martha endured.

After his prayers, he would go to Mass, first picking up our little dog, Patches, who would follow on his heels. Patches would wait outside on the church steps and then accompany my grandfather back to our house.

My grandfather would disappear into the cellar, where he would work with a variety of chemicals, hoping to create a different kind of cream. “I’m working on a special formula,” he told us. “This is going to be big. This is going to make us rich. This is going to be my legacy.”

His evenings were devoted to writing his novel about his early days and his Sicilian friends. “You wouldn’t believe what went on in my barber shop,” he told us. “The things I heard, the things that were done.” And so on white lined paper, in his sprawling handwriting, he wrote page after page, promising us again, “This book is going to be big, give us a lot of money. They might even make it into a movie!” And again, he repeated that this was going to be his legacy.

We humored him, thankful that he was keeping busy, that he wasn’t any trouble. He never asked for rides, and he didn’t mind being alone. He never asked us for anything except –

One night at the dinner table, he told us that he had finally perfected his special cream. “It’s like a paste,” he said, “but it’s invisible. You put it on your wrinkles and it freezes them. Of course, it only lasts until you take it off at the end of the night, but for a while you look younger.”

He wanted Martha and me to go to New York and talk to Helene Rubenstein, in the hopes of selling the formula to her cosmetic company.

“I think Helene Rubenstein went out of business,” I told him.

“I’ll go,” Martha said happily.

A few days later, my grandfather told my mother he wasn’t feeling well. “In case, I have to go into the hospital,” he said, “I don’t want my gray roots showing.”  He asked my mother to dye his hair black, which she did.

The next morning he was admitted for tests.

When my seventy-five year old uncle came to visit him, my grandfather said, “When I get out of here, I think I’m going to take up golf. I always wanted to play. It seems like such a peaceful, calm sport.”

My uncle, the eternal pessimist, snapped back, “What’s the matter with you, Pa? You’re an old man. You aren’t getting out of here so soon!”

My grandfather died two days later, just months from his 100th birthday.

It took my mother a couple of weeks to clean out his studio apartment. There was no sign of the manuscript and the formula for his vanishing cream was missing. My mother threw away the chemicals in our cellar and gave the entire set of Mad Magazines to a neighborhood boy.

It is said that “Old age is sad not because our joys are over but because our hopes have ended.”

My grandfather did not believe that. He had confidence that he could stretch his potential, continued to challenge himself and he thought that the best was yet to come.

Watching him as he approached his later life with optimism and hope taught me a valuable lesson. And perhaps that was his biggest legacy of all.