Perhaps because my impression of him has been subsequently transformed by another purposeful act—my father's story about what Grandfather did to the car Father had built from scrap. The truth is, I don't remember Grandpa Heller at all, except through Father's descriptions of him.
        Have I somehow “chosen” to remember my grandfather only this way? Or am I compelled to do so, even now, by the power of Father's story?
        Two decades after my childhood visit to Kansas City I would write a novel called The Automotive History of Lucky Kellerman. The protagonist, Frank “Lucky” Kellerman, is based on my father. Many of the events and situations in the novel are things I remember; other things are made up. In the opening pages Lucky locks himself inside an old one-room stone schoolhouse filled with honeybees. His purpose is to reconstruct from junked parts a 1932 Model 18 Ford Deluxe Roadster, a legacy for his son Curly, whom he has seen only once in the last ten years. Lucky is haunted by the voice of his wife Babe, who died a year earlier. I'll swan, Frank, she says to him through the walls of the schoolhouse. Lucky boards up the windows of the schoolhouse, leaving only a small peephole. The peephole allows him to gaze across the yard at a wide carport under whose roof he has parked five of the automobiles he has owned. Each represents a different stage of his life. Two automobiles are missing: a Model T Ford that he built himself from scrap, and the Model 18 he is now constructing for his son. Lucky builds the Model 18 surrounded by thousands of bees (he calls them his “honeys”). They fill the schoolhouse with the vibrant hum of their own energy and the sweet pungent smell of honeycomb, which fills the space between the interior and exterior walls that composes their enormous hive. As Lucky works on the car, speckled with live bees, he stares through the peephole and reconstructs his automotive history.
        There is in fact an old one-room stone schoolhouse on the five acres where I grew up, a few miles north of Yukon, Oklahoma. When my father, Steve Heller Sr., was a boy, his nickname was Lucky. His term of endearment for my mother was Babe; he called me Curly. Like Lucky, my father—a high school dropout who became an electrician, amateur mechanic, and all-around fix-it man—used the schoolhouse as his workshop. For almost a decade, the schoolhouse was occupied by a swarm of honeybees, who made a hive inside the walls, just like Lucky's honeys. Like Lucky, my father tried a variety of ways to rid the schoolhouse of the bees (pesticide, smoke, beekeepers), and received numerous stings for his trouble. Finally, like the character in the novel, he decided to share his workshop with the bees, fixing radios and sharpening lawn mower blades with bees literally crawling on his shoulders and back—and was never stung again.

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