Grandpa

I'm turning into my grandpa. I am now telling people how many days it has been since I left the house and sort-of feeling proud of it. It has been a week since I've "been off the place". I am going to venture out today though. It is weird how I can so vividly remember his voice as if I'm actually hearing him. "TOOTHPICK HELEN, TOOTHPICK!" The last really funny thing I remember him saying was when he was in Florida last winter. The phone rang and it was for Grandma. He yelled for her as he always does and gave her about 2 seconds to get there before yelling again more adamently. She answered that she was coming and his reply was "SO IS CHRISTMAS!" I don't know why I found that so funny, but it was. I have lots of funny stories about him which I love to tell to anyone who will listen. I always have, even before he was sick. One of my favorites is when he tried to shoot a mouse in the living room. The way I know the story to go is he was sitting in the living room cleaning one of his guns when a mouse ran across the fireplace. Still sitting in his chair he put a bullet in the gun and tried to shoot the poor thing right there in the living room next to the television. I don't know if he actually got it, that part of the story was never important to me, I hope he didn't, but this story I will tell probably for the rest of my life. He had a thing for guns, another favorite story is when he was found trying to shoot a chipmunk out the kitchen window. Jim told this one as he was the lucky one to come upon Grandpa one afternoon standing in the kitchen with the window cranked open blasting away the indoor/outdoor carpet on the patio trying to shoot the resident chipmunk. Those chipmunks had been driving him nuts for a long time. He even put the cat outside to try to catch them. She did but what he didn't know is everytime she did Grandma would run out and set the poor thing free. He always thought that cat was worthless because she couldn't even catch a ground squirrel. He finally learned to live with the chips running across the back porch all day long and even started to enjoy watching them. Another story I remember I actually was there for and that is when they drained the pond to dig it out again. Grandpa decided he wanted the water to be really deep at the end of the pier so he could dive off the pier. For some reason someone left him the backhoe and when I arrived he was in it down in the pond digging out the end of the pier. I made the mistake of pointing out that the pier was coming away from the patio so he yelled at me to get off of it and then started ramming it with the bucket on the backhoe to push it back in place. I'm surprised the whole thing didn't fall over. Both of us were yelling at each other over the noise of the backhoe. I was yelling at him to stop before he tore the whole thing down and he was yelling at me to go back in the house. I don't think he ever did dive off the end of the pier. There are so many more and some I just heard not too long ago like when he tried to remove a tree stump using dynamite. He dug a hole under the stump and put the dynamite in then put a rock on top of it. Well, he ended up blowing the rock across the street and the tree stump stayed. My all time favorite though is when he shot himself in the leg. I think he was trying to put a hold in concrete for some reason and decided shooting it would be the way to go. His partner Denzel had enough sense to go hide behind something before the shooting began and as you can probably guess the bullet richocheted back and hit Grandpa in the leg. My grandma was in Colorado at the time and upon returning home she asked if anything had happened while she was gone. He told her not really, he shot himself in the leg but it was okay, he put a band-aid on it. I'm surprised he didn't put a little diesel fuel on it too. He always claimed that would cure anything. I could go on and on but Jayke wants to go to the duck pond. I think I've covered my favorits anyway. I always wanted him to write some of his stories down, I guess I did a little bit of it for him.