In the early winter of 1976, there was a meeting of the minds.

On the first floor of a hospital in Modesto, Calif., a young baby boy had been born into a maelstrom of fear and dysfunction. Underweight, bottle-fed, but otherwise healthy and thriving, James Faulk the younger ultimately came out all right, though his gestation had been dominated by fear, anxiety, and the constant panic that in some way may have played a role in leaving my older, stillborn brother Stanley misshapen and unfit for this world. In one of those strange, possibly cosmic exceptions none of us can ever really understand, he just wasn’t meant to be, while I was.

Throughout my childhood, I was insecure, nervous, demanding of attention and at times spoiled, but I had a healthy ticker, a robust pair of lungs, and I developed into a healthy, even stout, child.

Even to this day I’m grateful, and sometimes guilt-ridden, for the opportunity that my older brother never got.

I’d like to think that at least part of my survivability came from a brief meeting I had with the true Faulk family paterfamilias, James Boyd Faulk, who at the time of my birth was struggling through the last stages of lung cancer. I was barely a few days old when my mother and grandmother bundled me up into the white-cotton antiseptic sheets, secretly trucked me up through the hallways of the antiquated hospital past white-garbed doctors deep in discussion over golf scores and time-share real estate to sneak me into the facility’s cancer ward, where I was ceremoniously handed off to my dying granddad.

Depending on who you ask in my family, grandpa can either be described as a violent, malevolent abuser of men or a loving if overworked and overwrought man who did his very best to improve the overall situation of his family. In this instant, by all accounts, he was a creature of love.

I know enough of family lore now to understand that the family originally came from some money. Grandad’s own granddad had a ranch, a thriving trade business, and even a general store that he eventually plied into a run for the 1920s Oklahoma State Legislature. For several years his constituents seemed to like the work he was doing, and so re-elected him. But like everything else in those days, it wasn’t meant to last. Soon the cash, like the land and the crops and the fortitude of the struggling people, dried up and hitched a ride on one of the trillions of tumbleweeds making the nationwide trek west to a land of difference and hope, as colorfully rendered on posters.

And so it was with my grandpa. He uprooted what little holdings he had had in Oklahoma after the depleted family fortune and bad blood had sucked the coffers virtually dry. Then, loaded up on the back of some jalopy thought reliable enough to make the metaphysical sojourn to this or that Promised Land, they set out across the dry wastes, the Rocky Mountains, more incessant desert and finally — if the faded, sweat-sopping handbills and over-wrought advertising were to be believed, to a paradise where work was waiting for them.

To make a long story short, it wasn’t. The struggles were just beginning. Grandad plied his trade in every manner of occupation, as did the kids, from picking fruit to bundling hay, at times all stuffed up like pickles in jar in a grass hut the size of most bathrooms today, where they slept in fitful shifts until some boss or other came along to wake them up by raking sticks along the rough clapboards that was all there was between them and subzero temperatures.

Grandfather held the family together in these times, got them to work and school as best he could, scrimped a dime here and three pennies there, and soon had the whole lot of them moving into a nice suburban home in West Modesto, Calif., where he would spend the rest of his days raising hounds and peeling almonds in a converted orchard set aside for men like him.

My own father, stricken with a malaise of the mind, fixated on the occasional discipline my grandfather bestowed, and was blinded to his father’s bountiful good sides. Honestly, I grew up confused. Was grandpa the monster dad hated, or the great man my own grandmother loved?

After my grandfather’s death, as I grew old enough to appreciate the history and dignity represented by all the now-rusted hard-used tools that were slowly seizing up in the garage, I struggled with this question, struggled with which of these two absent father figures I should strive to be more like.

It was many years before the answer came to me, through the Wild West wisdom of my older brother Jerry. We were hunting blacktail deer in the mountains (don’t worry — no animals were hurt in the making of this column) and he described for me the grandpa he knew. Being 12 years my senior, he’d gotten to know the man, had even traveled across country with him at one point, and told me in in no uncertain — if somewhat drunken — terms, that Grandpa was a good, caring man. A loving man. He’d worked more than he liked, and was baffled at times about what to do with his often troubled, wild sons, but it wasn’t for lack of love. Or lack of trying.

Later that same school year, we were assigned an essay in English class to write about one person in our lives who may have had the profoundest effect on who it is we’ve turned out to be. This is one of those lucky moments when the teacher we have is perfectly suited to help a student reach a new level of personal growth. Susan Turner, teacher at Zane Middle School, didn’t even bat an eye when I said I wanted to write about a personal hero of mine who I’d never met. Who had long been dead.

I love her for that. Writing that middle school essay, one so flippantly assigned, allowed me to connect with the one immediate ancestor of mine whose life and deeds gave me an example through which I could make my own choices, live my own life, while still staying true to the values I believe we as a family have historically held dear.