This post is dedicated Grandpa Sederquist

One resolution my wife and I made for 2026 was to establish a few more family routines and rituals.

Last year, we established (somewhat) weekly ‘Sabbath’ meals. While I strive to stir up more time-intensive dishes, we somewhat arbitrarily decided the only actual requirements for these ‘special’ family meals are that we 1) serve wine and 2) say “This is the day the Lord has made” at the end of our prayers.

This weekend, I thought it would be a brilliant idea to add a ‘Sunday ski’ to the schedule.

Instead of wasting away the easily compromised time between the benediction and our children’s post-lunch quiet time, I figured we could mimic our Norwegian ancestors. Why not pack up our meat and cheese and take it with us for a long family excursion through the woods?!

Even before I untangled the cursed Chariot from some outgrown car seat on the highest shelf of our garage, I already kind of knew the answer to that question.

With a 4-year-old, an almost 3-year-old, and a newborn, the only ‘long’ part of the ordeal would be the time it took for me to corral the kids’ coats, boots and poles together and wrangle up the right snacks to keep them perfectly occupied — or at least bridge the all-important gap between “I’m cold” and “this isn’t so bad after all.”

Despite those negative thoughts, I know going the extra mile for even 20 meters of “skiing” is what parenting in the trenches of toddlerhood is really all about. Even though my prep prognostication proved to be 100% accurate, it was totally worth it.

I smiled watching Novi perfect her Klaebo step (no joke!). I beamed when she abandoned her lunch to ski uphill after Mom, who finally got an escape from the kiddos while I monitored our trailside camp. Pulling Ella so she could experience the gliding sensation was priceless, as was my irate insistence that she learn to get up on her own after falling for the 30th time. I’m still working on patience.

Several hours later, I went back out into the cold night, headlamp and all, hoping to recapture the afternoon’s perfectly fast, warm conditions. Unfortunately, by the time I started skating, the snow had devolved into a styrofoam mess. My search for that rare and elusive effortless glide had become another victim of Colorado’s dry, frigid evenings.

‘Oh well,’ I thought, as I chucked my skis back into the truck to drive home.

‘I’m a blessed man.’

The next day, I woke up and called my mom and dad after reading my Bible. They informed me my grandpa had passed away in the early hours of the morning. Perhaps not by coincidence, I’d spent my devotional time thinking of him. I don’t know why, but I’d been staring at the sun coming over the mountain ridges, straining my brain to conjure up a memory of my grandpa when he was the same age my parents are now.

That’s when a distinct movie started playing in my mind, for whatever reason.

There I was, with my two brothers, sitting in the back of a warm, boxy, beat up old green van in Bagley, Minnesota. We watched as Grandpa packed up the last few things. The worms. Poles. Lifejackets. A tackle box. Some drinks.

Then he hooked his small fishing boat up to the rusty vehicle, a car that — up until that exact point in time — I assumed was serving its sole purpose by sitting in the woods. It was the cousin of the ol’ combine that had been wasting away in the field for decades. Both junkers were meant to make Grandpa’s property fit in with his rural Northern Minnesota neighbors in some bizarre nostalgic sense. Anyway, we piled into the back seat and took off to Lake Lemond, where we spent a sunny midsummer day catching pan fish.

After Grandpa cleaned our catches, Grandma fried them up for us to eat. It was a scene straight out of “Up North at The Cabin,” except we weren’t all sitting on the same side of the table to “watch the loons dance down the sun.”

It was the summer version of my idyllic Sunday family ski — three decades in the rearview mirror and clear as day in my mind.

The best column I’ve ever written was ironically also about fishing with my Grandpa. Incredibly, it received a negative response from one dissatisfied reader who was left dumbfounded because I didn’t discuss how “legislation” could solve “fatherly absenteeism.” The most fishing I do these days is filing someone else’s weekly fishing column in the Vail Daily. Alas, to the delight of my father-in-law, I’ve promoted the activity — at times even on this blog! — as being equally formative for young boys as (hold your breath now) … skiing.

So, is this blog about fishing? Or skiing? Or my grandpa?

All three?

My Grandpa was a big, strong figure. The kind of man who exuded his love — and authority — in his handshake. For most of my life, his forearms seemed stronger and wider and more muscular than my quads. He collected guns and also Folger’s coffee cans and Jif peanut butter containers to store screws and bolts in. He had an out building filled with mysterious machinery and a basement with other treasures waiting to be uncovered, like canned peaches from 1987 and farm implements from what seemed like 100 years before that. He captained his motorhome South every winter and went hunting in his backyard every fall.

Here’s a big, grand sentence he maybe would have appreciated (but probably also would have fallen asleep trying to read, just like when he pulled open those 1400-page American history anthologies stashed in his basement bookshelf after a hearty meal): my Grandpa fed all of his grand dogs right off his own spoon in-between bites of ice cream, the one item that — whenever Grandma announced was being served — had the power to awaken him from his predictably deep post-dinner slumbers, which he peacefully indulged in while his kids and grandkids boisterously argued about politics, laughed at each others’ idiosyncrasies, and practically rioted over acceptable answers during our annual guys-vs.-gals Trivial Pursuit marathons.

Speaking of marathons, Grandpa stood at the finish line of many of my high school cross-country races. Dressed in all denim, he stepped forcefully across those manicured golf courses, walking stick in hand, NRA truckers cap accentuating his tall forehead; he was the guy you could always easily spot.

“Good job son,” he would say to me or my brothers — or even my close friends, Andrew and Lukas — when we came through the chute. He always said, ‘son’ in situations like that. Sometimes, right before the starter would give final instructions, my grandpa would appear behind the starting line to give us one final hug. I don’t think my teammates particularly appreciated that, but it’s a really awesome anecdote to reflect on now.

All that and much, much more could be said about my grandpa, from his homemade bread and wild rice pancakes to those large tubs of chocolate-covered snacks he bought at Fleet Farm or Flying J to have permanently available for any and all road trips. There was that one time when he yelled at my adventurous and sometimes extreme cousin, a too-cool snowboarding teen at the time: “Stay away from anything that has four wheels and an engine!”

Or all those times he yelled “What?! at Grandma ….and then — after she repeated whatever phrase she had just uttered — settled on a contemplative, “Ohhh….” as he raised his obnoxiously bushy eye brows. He didn’t get everything in life: he sadly never got to witness the Vikings win a Super Bowl. But to be honest, my grandpa was never more visibly content than when his entire family was simply present.

In summary, I guess you could argue his picture belongs in the dictionary right next to the word ‘grandpa.’

And yet, at one point, he was a 60-something-year-old guy — with full faculty and plenty of retirement flexibility and money to spend on whatever he wanted — who nonetheless decided one sunny day — fishing’s perfect ‘gliding’ day, so to speak — to corral his three grandsons, wrangle up the kids’ fishing poles, worms, hooks etc., and drive over to the insignificant local watering hole — sacrificing the ease of his own private fishing outing — to try and make a more important, lifelong memory.

I hope I still have the energy to hook up the Chariot when I’m 60, too.

My grandpa will be missed.

I’m convinced whenever we witness death up close, it crystalizes within our souls a reality we know but always suppress or are too distracted or busy or unwilling to confront: the fleeting nature of our own existence. When we do address it, however, we’re convicted to prioritize people over projects or paychecks. To hug someone a second longer or actually tell them how important they are to us — and why. We almost feel silly for ever thinking anything could have been more important than the things that really matter.

I noted in the opening how at the end of each Sabbath meal prayer, I always say, “This is the day the Lord has made.”

What I forgot to mention was that my wife and daughters, and eventually Hugo, too, are required to respond — joyfully — with this:

“Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

I can’t say for sure whether Sunday skis will be a regular occurrence, even in my household. I hope they are. But I hope even more I can give my kids — and if I’m lucky, their kids — the real gift behind those types of memories. (For crying out loud, before that happens can someone please invent a better Chariot!!!).

Even if they move away and forget to call me or don’t realize their grandparents’ important influence until it’s too late, I hope those Sunday skis (or fishing trips) clearly convey that prayer’s dual truths. That this day, and every day, is the Lord’s. That the sovereign God of the universe holds all things together, disciplines his children and provides them with their daily bread. That whatever happens on this day, and every day, is for their good and His glory.

And for that, we ought to have one response, whether we’re fishing or skiing …

….or sitting with our old eyes closed and hard-of-hearing ears open at a once-crowded dinner table while kids run around us, dogs bark beneath us and aunts and uncles wash the dishes and get the pie out from the deep freeze…..

“Rejoice and be glad.”