My grandmother's attic was a time capsule. After she decided to move into a smaller apartment, it fell to my parents and me to sort through a lifetime of accumulated memories. It was a dusty, sweltering job, filled with old furniture, boxes of photos, and the ghosts of forgotten hobbies.
In a dark corner, tucked under a canvas tarp, was a large, heavy wooden trunk. "What's this?" I asked my dad.
He wiped a layer of dust from the lid. "Oh, that was your Grandpa Kenji's. He passed away when you were just a baby. He was an engineer, like you're going to be."
My interest was piqued. We wrestled the trunk down from the attic and pried open the rusted latches. The air that escaped smelled of old paper and something else... a faint, metallic, ozone-like smell I recognized instantly from Gregory's shack.
The trunk was filled with amateur radio equipment. It was ancient stuff, from the 1960s and 70s. There was a huge, boat-anchor of a receiver with a beautiful, glowing amber dial, and a transmitter that looked like it belonged in a World War II submarine. And beneath the gear were stacks of logbooks, their pages yellowed and brittle with age.
I reverently lifted one out and opened it. The pages were filled with my grandfather's neat, precise handwriting. And there, on the top line, was his callsign.
"Dad," I whispered, my voice thick with awe. "Grandpa was a ham."
My dad peered over my shoulder. "I'll be darned. I'd completely forgotten. He used to spend hours up here, talking to people. We just called it his 'radio phase'."
I spent the rest of the afternoon lost in those logbooks. It was like discovering a secret history of my own family. My grandfather had talked to the world from this very house. I saw contacts from Japan, Australia, Italy. He had QSL cards-postcards from other hams-covered in exotic stamps, tucked between the pages.
Then I saw an entry that made my heart stop. It was a local contact from over thirty years ago. The callsign was familiar. I knew that callsign.
I grabbed my phone and pulled up the FCC database. I typed in the old call. The record came up instantly. The holder of that callsign was Gregory. My Gregory. Pathfinder.
I carefully packed one of the logbooks and the strange callsign into my bag. The next day, I went to Gregory's shack. He was tinkering with an antenna tuner, humming to himself.
"Gregory," I said, my voice trembling slightly. "I need to ask you about someone. Did you ever know a ham named Kenji?"
He stopped what he was doing and looked at me, his eyes clouded with memory. "Kenji? Of course. A fine man. One of the best CW operators I ever knew. He went silent key many years ago. Why do you ask?"
I opened my grandfather's logbook to the bookmarked page and laid it on the workbench. "Because he was my grandfather."
Gregory stared at the logbook, then at me, his mouth agape. He traced the callsign with a calloused finger. "I can't believe it," he whispered. "Kenji's granddaughter. I was his Elmer."
The world seemed to tilt on its axis. The man who had guided me into this hobby, who had become a grandfather figure to me, had done the same for my actual grandfather a generation earlier. It wasn't a coincidence that I had found this path. It was an echo. It was a legacy.
Gregory told me stories about my grandfather, about their friendship forged over the airwaves. He told me how my grandfather, a quiet and reserved man, came alive on the radio, his wit and intelligence shining through in his Morse code conversations.
"He would be so incredibly proud of you, Haruka," Gregory said, his eyes misty. "You have his spark."
That evening, I went home and carefully cleaned the old radio equipment from the trunk. It was too old to be functional, but it was beautiful. I cleared a place of honor on a shelf in my shack for my grandfather's receiver. Its amber dial, dark for decades, now stood as a silent testament to a connection that spanned generations. My hobby wasn't just my own anymore. I was part of a chain, a signal passed from my grandfather, through Gregory, to me. And it was my turn to keep it going, to send that signal out into the future.