My grandfather

This month my grandfather passed away at the age of 88. I would like to think of him.
He was born in Hiroshima in 1919. He was 2 year younger than President Kennedy. He had been good at Classical Chinese when he was student. He wanted to be a high school teacher of Classical Chinese. However, he couldn't. World war Ⅱ and tuberculosis forced him to give up his career as a teacher. He spent his 20s in China as a soldier. He used to tell me about the war and how the Japanese army was ridiculous. When he was talking to me, he often said, "You can do anything you want because there are no longer wars in Japan." He emphasised that a war destroys future of young people. I think he'd have been a good teacher if the war had not happened. After the war he returned to Hiroshima, but he could not find a job. He often said, "A soldier never gets a proper job in time of peace, he can just murder." Finally he decided to leave Hiroshima and went to Tokyo in order to find a job. He worked at a factory until he was 50. At the age of 50 he suddenly quit his job
though his sons were still teens. However he had enough money to feed them. He had got a lot of money, but his life was absolutely frugal.
For the rest of his life he engaged in ploughing a field for vegetables. He had been going to his 20 Km remote field by bicycle every weekdays and grew vegetables for more than 30 years. I can remember that I had plenty of organic vegetables he grew such as tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, broad bean, white radishes and so on. Thanks for his vegetables, I hardly ever ate junk food in my childhood when first food companies had been landing in Japan from the U.S. For last few years he had got a small allotment nearby his house and he was ploughing it until this month.
He read books for his entire life. He not only read books in Japanese and Classical Chinese books, but also he has subscribed to an English magazine Newsweek for more than 10 years. I think he could not speak and listening English, but he could read it better than me. We found his very worn-out 3 English dictionaries when we were preparing for his funeral. At his funeral my father put the latest Newsweek and one of his dictionary into his coffin. I got the other dictionaries as a memento of him. He had been studying until he passed away. I learned from him that I have to continue studying and even getting older. I am proud of him and I would like to live as well as him.