Grandpa & Me - soo sci fi short (not porn!)
Grandpa and Me
“We are not a good fit with this world”.
He looked me in the eye and I looked straight back at him. Everything my Grandfather said was amazing.
I think we were eating ham sandwiches on the porch or maybe they were egg sandwiches. The certain part of it is that Gran had made them and bought them to us on her blue and white looks-like-china while we sat there side by side watching the farm.
“Could you live in the wild Kitten ?”
It was a game we played - and I knew all the answers. His and mine.
“Yes I could Grandpa ! I could stay in a tent outdoors and eat fruit off the trees !”
I thought I had him this time. I was getting bigger. Smarter.
“So you finally thought to bring a tent Kitten. Good for you. But remember the rules honey…you suddenly find yourself in the wild. You don’t have any money to buy a tent.. and in any case…where would you buy it from ?”
“No stores ?”
“No stores kitten”
Damn. I knew there were no stores.
“Mom always makes me wear my grey jacket with the wool lining when I go out so I would be wearing that…even if I found myself in the wild all of a sudden ! I would be okay in my grey jacket through any cold weather !”
“What if it rained and your grey jacket couldn’t get dry. You would get pretty cold pretty quickly then.”
Damn again. I should have said that mom always makes me wear my rain-mack. But that wasn’t true and there was no point in lying to Grandpa in this game.
“I would try not to get wet then”
“And what if it got really hot like it does in this country and you had no place to shelter ?”
“Don’t be silly Grandpa ! Then I would take off my grey jacket !”
“With bare arms under the hot African sun ? Your skin would burn and blister. It would peel right off your body. Your lips would swell up and you would DIE OF THIRST !”
I had nothing to say to that. I never did when it got to this part of the game. My role was over. The rest was listening - and I could listen to Grandpa all night.
“Toffee Dog could survive in the wild” I said.
Toffee wined and pricked up his ears when he heard his name and sunk lower on to the planks beneath my chair. It wasn’t diner time for him yet and he probably suspected he would have to chase a stick or something. He was generally a lazy dog.
“He could live off the fat on his tummy !”
“Maybe for a little while he could do that - but remember kitten we made him that way. Feeding him and sheltering him like he never needed to be. Making him into the fat no-good he is today. Actually though he could manage just fine in the wild. He has his big hairy coat for the cold and he can hang his tongue out in the heat. He doesn’t need shoes or a hat or any of those things. He can catch things and eat them.”
Then we would sit for a while and look at the sky and ponder our significance. Or Grandpa would do the pondering and I would finish my sandwich and wait for the first frog of the evening to get started signally the time to go indoors - before the mozzies decended on us.
Just before going in he would always say one last time; “We are not a fit with this place Kitten. It was always been completely obvious to me and I am not sure why the rest are all sitting around pretending not to notice. We don’t belong here and we just have to make the best of it until we find out where we do belong.”
Grandpa never pretended to have the big answers.
He died at the age of 89 of prostate cancer. As he had always said - if you live long enough we will all eventually get Cancer, we just don’t know the type that will take us out. I always thought that he had made that one up until I took the time to read up on it. Its true.