Grandpa
Posted October 4th, 2004 by Sean WilliamsI’ve not really had grandparents for most of my life. I remember my Dad’s Dad dying when I was about five, and I was really upset about that. He was incredibly nice to me, for some reason, which is strange because he was an extremely cruel man according to legend. I didn’t know my Mom’s Dad or my Dad’s Mom. My Mom’s Mom, the one we called Grandma, was the only grandparent I knew.
(As an aside, I know people need nicknames for the different sets of grandparents, but *MAN* I’m glad we never had any of that “Nanaboo” or “Gobly-Wobly” kind of names for our grandparents. Whenever I heard that, it felt like that American Patrician habit of giving people the most insulting names. Multi-millionaire heirs would be named “Scootsey” or something, and it would freak me out, growing up. We just had “grandma” and a lot of dead people.)
So, now I have grandma, Jordana’s Paternal Grandmother, and Grandpa, Jordana’s Maternal Grandfather, if you can follow the math of that. They both deserve their own blogs, but I’m not doing that right now. I just want to tell a quick story.
Grandpa was a naval Lieutenant in WWII, and he went around the world twice. He wears his service in the same way he wears his Jewishness, as a constant source of his own amusement. Everything in his life is a joke. Not to say he’s a merry old soul. Hardly. He’s about as sardonic and ironic as you can imagine. He makes extensive jokes about his years spent as a young woman in the military, he’s not above a tragic over-reaching pun, and his whole life is spent waving off people who try to tell him nice things. Jordana will say, “I love you Grandpa,” and he’ll say, “What do you know? You’re just a kid…”
This is also a guy born of the depression, who has never rubbed two nickles together for fear that it might lower the value of either coin.
He’s 85 or so years old. I don’t know, maybe 80. And he is still living on his own, doing his own shit. But the important thing to know is that he could give a shit what you think, and everything to him is a joke.
So. He is going about his daily business, walking from one place to another to do his errands, and he realizes that the cup of coffee and bran muffin he had is starting to make him feel a little anxious. He realizes he probably should find a bathroom, so he does what any red-blooded American would do, he goes to McDonald’s.
He takes care of his business in the bathroom and realizes that there is no toilet paper, no paper towels, no kleenex, nothing. To hear him tell the story really makes the story, but he essentially sat there for a minute or two wondering what to do. Then he recalled his days in France and noticed the low-lying sink next to him. He did what any red-blooded American would do. He half sat in the sink and shot water up his backside until he felt pretty clean.
He turned the water off and noticed that not only is there no toilet paper, but, again, there is also no paper towels. Nothing. When pressed what he did, he said, “I dried off with four dollar bills.” but absolutely nobody believed that. He wouldn’t have dried off with four dimes, if it meant losing the forty cents. So he said “what do you think I did?” and Jordana’s mom said, “You used the hot air hand dryer?” and Grandpa’s eyes got really big, he pointed at Lorna and said, “Were you there? I don’t remember seeing you!”
Sorry. I had nothing to blog about today, and this story cracked me up.