A grandfather is someone with silver in his hair and gold in his heart.
~Author Unknown
“How much longer ’til Grandpa and Grandma get here?” my little sister Kris asked.
“Probably only an hour or so,” Mom assured her.
Ten minutes less than the last time you asked, I thought.
“Aww, really?”
“Yes,” Mom told her, “and there’s still a lot to do to get ready.”
I looked around the living room we’d been cleaning. This was the cleanest our house had been since last year’s spring-cleaning. I couldn’t imagine what else we needed to do.
“Joy, go fix the couch cushions. Kris, go dust the stereo.”
“But we already dusted it,” Kris complained.
“Look at all that dust in the corner.”
I turned toward the couch and rolled my eyes, sympathetic to Kris’s situation, but not willing to get involved. This was just the way it always was when Grandpa and Grandma came to visit. No matter how hard we tried, there’d still be a problem of some sort, especially…
“Oh, no! What about the toaster?” I called to Mom.
This was a real crisis. I couldn’t believe we hadn’t thought of it sooner.
How would we tell Grandpa the toaster was broken again?
My grandpa was a bit of a fix-it guy. He had a shop in the corner of his basement where he loved to fix things. This shop was where all items with flaws of any kind went to be repaired — cracked croquet balls were repainted, tilting knick-knack shelves were realigned, and used toasters were rewired.
And that was the problem. Years before, on one of their visits, Grandpa had discovered that we didn’t have a toaster. Our old one had quit working, and with our family’s tight budget, we hadn’t replaced it. Grandpa found this completely unacceptable and vowed to get us a new one.
In the weeks to follow, I’d thought about that new toaster, imagining what it would be like to be the first to push the lever on the shiny new machine and to smell the toast browning inside. We didn’t have new things in our house at that time so this was really exciting.
What I had forgotten, unfortunately, was that Grandpa didn’t do “new” like some people did. In addition to working in his shop, Grandpa loved to go to auctions. He’d always find something banged up or broken and take it home to his shop for repairs. This time it was a toaster, which he proudly presented to us on our next visit to his house.
“Now, you have to jiggle the handle a bit sometimes, and you have to watch it so it doesn’t burn,” he told us. “Don’t run off and forget it, girls, or you’ll have black toast. But, look! See, it works great!”
Grandpa looked around at us all, his eyes shining with pride, and we readily agreed that it was perfect.
For weeks after we took that toaster home, we wiggled the handle and watched our toast. Sometimes it would get burnt, but many times we had perfectly browned toast for breakfast — until the morning it quit working all together.
“Well, that was good while it lasted,” Mom said. “It was nice of Grandpa to try.”
That Thanksgiving when Grandpa asked me how our toaster was working out, I wasn’t sure what to say. I hated to disappoint him, but I couldn’t lie.
“It stopped working,” I told him reluctantly.
“Really? I wonder why.” Grandpa seemed truly perplexed. “Did you forget and leave it on too long?”
On their next visit, Grandpa brought us another toaster.
“Now, this one pops up great,” he told us, “but sometimes the toast is not quite done, so you just have to push the bread down again. Two or three times should work,” he told us with confidence.
Two or three times was in fact about right — every day for several months before it quit on us.
This pattern continued for several years. There was the toaster that only worked on one side so we had to toast one slice at a time, and the toaster that only toasted one side of the bread so we had to flip it around. One of the toasters only toasted the bottom two-thirds of the bread. We just had to turn it upside-down about halfway through.
Now, as we frantically prepared for our grandparents’ arrival, Kris asked Mom, “Why don’t we just buy a new toaster and tell Grandpa we don’t need one anymore?”
It seemed logical to me. Mom had a new job, and we could afford a few things now. We’d just gotten a new microwave. A toaster couldn’t be that expensive.
“We can’t,” Mom explained. “It would hurt your grandpa’s feelings.”
“Really?” Kris asked. I agreed. Grandpa didn’t seem to have a lot of feelings. He never hugged anyone, never cried and rarely even laughed. He was a very straight-up kind of guy.
“Grandpa doesn’t always know how to show his feelings,” she explained. “The toasters are his way of showing he loves us.”
The idea quickly grew on me. Fixing things for people was the only way Grandpa could let people know he cared. So, having agreed to once again explain things to Grandpa and await a new toaster, I turned to my couch duties, determined to make sure Grandpa knew how much we loved our toasters.
Grandpa’s gone now, and I have a home and family of my own. We don’t own a toaster. I’ve tried several times to buy one at the store, but it never seems quite right. Maybe someday I’ll find a good one at a yard sale — one that only toasts on one side or doesn’t always pop up right. I’m not sure any other kind will do.
~Joy Cook
