MY TYPICALLY TACITURN grandfather—wielding a dandelion “poker”—looked up from his weeding:
“Your grandmother and I had words today . . .”
Before I could respond, he continued:
“ . . . but I didn't get to use mine.”
That quip was typical of his laconic sense of humor. A man of few words,
he usually let my grandmother do the talking. And “do the talking,” she
did!
“Ed! Slow down – you're taking those hills way too fast! You're gonna kill us all!”
“Ed! Don't eat so fast—no one's going to take that food away from you!”
Don't get me wrong, they had a truly loving relationship—happily married
for 67 years. It was just that my dear grandmother had a tendency to . .
. how can I put this . . . well, she was known to critique certain behaviors of my grandfather's, e.g., how fast he'd eat, how he sat when watching TV, etc.
My grandparent's house was always my first stop after school as Grandma
always had a plate of fresh-baked cookies for an after-school snack, and
then she'd have something good in the oven for supper.
So this one afternoon as I was checking out the cookie jar, Grandma said with a twinkle in her eye:
“Your grandpa's mad at me.”
“Why's that?”
“I threw away his bar of soap.”
“His bar of soap?”
“He always smashes the old pieces of soap together, and he doesn't need
to do that! I threw that mashed up soap out and put a new bar of Dial in
his shower.”
You see my grandfather was a very frugal guy, and he would never dream
of wasting a bar of soap. So, when the bar got down to an unmanageable
size, he'd stick that little scrap of soap onto a fresh bar. And
eventually when that amalgamation of soap got so small that he couldn't manage it anymore, he'd repeat the process.
It was something he'd become proud of . . . how huge a bar of bath soap he could sculpt from little pieces.
So, Grandpa's patched-together bar of soap somehow irritated my grandmother to no end; and she tossed it—much to Grandpa's umbrage.
Fast forward fifty years . . . one morning in the shower while trying to
meld two pieces of soap together into a “soapmash,” it suddenly hit me
that I must have picked up this peculiar tendency from my grandfather.
Is it a learned behavior or a rare genetic disorder – dominant on the
Traeger side but absent from the Book side of the family that compels me
to squish bars of soap together?!
Regardless, doing so reminds me of my Grandpa Traeger. And by the way,
please note my current soapmash masterpiece—my grandfather would have
been proud!
Take a poll: Do you soapmash—yes or no? click
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