Spork
There is no spoon
Earlier today, in another corner of the internet, I was reminded of the following and thought I'd share it here.
At family gatherings, my wife's grandfather used to love telling me stories over a cigar on the back porch. Same stories, every time, but I'm always as polite as can be to my elders and acted like it was the first telling, every time. Truth be told, I politely tolerated most of them, because one of them stood out as my favorite, not because of the story, per se, but because of how happy it made him to tell it.
When he was around 14, his father finally allowed him to drive the horse-drawn wagon into town by himself to take things to market. When he get out of eyesight of the family farm, he stopped on the road for a minute to load and light his corn-cob pipe that he had made himself. And off he went down the road, puffin' his corn-cob pipe on the way to town like a man.
Unbeknownst to him, while he was in town taking care of business, one of his neighbors had seen him smoking his pipe and told his dad (who was very anti-smoking). After finishing his business in town, he finally drove the horses up the road to their farm with a proud smile on his face that he had just done his first "adulting". As he was putting away the wagon and taking care of the horses, his dad came out and whooped his butt so bad that he had trouble sitting down for a week. He never smoked a pipe again. He would always end the story with "And that's why I smoke cigars!" And then we would laugh and laugh.
After he passed away at the ripe old age of 99, the family let on that everyone knew about the cigars, Pappy only thought he was sneaking them with me. They were also glad that I would listen to his stories because they'd heard them so many times before.
He wasn't my grandfather, but I miss him as much or more than my own.
At family gatherings, my wife's grandfather used to love telling me stories over a cigar on the back porch. Same stories, every time, but I'm always as polite as can be to my elders and acted like it was the first telling, every time. Truth be told, I politely tolerated most of them, because one of them stood out as my favorite, not because of the story, per se, but because of how happy it made him to tell it.
When he was around 14, his father finally allowed him to drive the horse-drawn wagon into town by himself to take things to market. When he get out of eyesight of the family farm, he stopped on the road for a minute to load and light his corn-cob pipe that he had made himself. And off he went down the road, puffin' his corn-cob pipe on the way to town like a man.
Unbeknownst to him, while he was in town taking care of business, one of his neighbors had seen him smoking his pipe and told his dad (who was very anti-smoking). After finishing his business in town, he finally drove the horses up the road to their farm with a proud smile on his face that he had just done his first "adulting". As he was putting away the wagon and taking care of the horses, his dad came out and whooped his butt so bad that he had trouble sitting down for a week. He never smoked a pipe again. He would always end the story with "And that's why I smoke cigars!" And then we would laugh and laugh.
After he passed away at the ripe old age of 99, the family let on that everyone knew about the cigars, Pappy only thought he was sneaking them with me. They were also glad that I would listen to his stories because they'd heard them so many times before.
He wasn't my grandfather, but I miss him as much or more than my own.
