My Granddad really enjoyed eating, especially breakfast. He knew how to make the most of a meal. He didn’t scarf it down but took his time and savored every bite. A mug of coffee or hot tea or hot chocolate was his dunking tank. He managed to find something in every meal to dunk in his drink and when he was done, he’d drink or spoon out the dregs. It didn’t matter what was served to him. At the end of the meal, he always said, “that was the best meal I ever had.” And he meant it.
It was fun to sit at the table with him. He always had a story to tell, often one I had heard umpteen times before, but it was always fresh and new. In his later years the same tale was sometimes told with a different cast of characters or locations and I believed it every time just as if was the first time I heard it.
One day as we sat at the table after lunch, he cut an orange in half. He took one of the halves and started eating it, then he squeezed it to slurp out the juice. He turned it wrong-side-out and ate the remainder of the orange. When he was all done, he didn’t say a word. He was too busy working his tongue to get every last bit of pulp from between his teeth. It wasn’t working too well. What he did next shocked me. There are not many things that turn my stomach, but when he popped out his chompers and started sucking the pulp out of his false teeth, I almost lost my lunch.
