Grandpa
I received an email from Mom, reminding me that yesterday was Grandpa’s birthday. Had he still been living, he would have turned 89. I remember when he passed long ago, I thought that he was old. Now, eighty-nine doesn’t seem so old at all.
Years ago, I had several opportunities to go to California to visit the grandparents for summer vacation. During one visit, when I was around eleven years old, I became sick with the flu. It was the kind of flu where keeping food down is virtually impossible, and the simple act of walking hurts the head.
Feeling as badly as I did, all I wanted to do was sleep. But Grandma insisted that I eat something, so she prepared a small bowl of watermelon cubes for me to eat. The juicy fruit was cold and it tasted good, and I think it might have helped bring the fever down.
Unfortunately, the watermelon didn’t want to stay, and I reached the bathroom just in time to throw it all up. After flushing the toilet and rinsing my mouth, I returned to the bedroom in a haze. I laid down in bed, wanting nothing more than to sleep. As I began to doze, my tongue ran across my teeth and I noticed that my retainer was not in my mouth. My retainer was gone! Granted a missing retainer is not the end of the world, but it is for an eleven year old boy.
I looked in the bathroom, but I couldn’t find it. Grandma looked, and then my Grandpa. Then Grandpa pointed-out that I probably flushed it down the toilet. I suddenly began to worry that I would be in trouble when my parents found out that I had lost my retainer.
Later, as I was back in bed, Grandma came into the room to tell me that I didn’t need to worry. She told me that there was still hope, for at that very moment Grandpa was attempting to retrieve the retainer with a magnet and a spool of string. While I apreciated the effort that Grandpa made to fish out the retainer, I was glad that he wasn’t able to catch it.