Grandfather breathed in heavily through his nose, looked down at me, removed the pipe from him mouth and I’m not sure, but I think he smiled as he said, “They’re doing something new with rock salt. What-What!”

He had completely ignored my question concerning his clown-like attire. I watched his pipe as he extended it like a thin curved finger to point at the sidewalk and the odd purple crystals that littered the walkway to the house like a trail of breadcrumbs.

Staring into the cold, he cleared his throat and added, “By injecting beet juice to the salt, it loses some of its corrosiveness to cars and lawns. What-What!”

Grandfather has a way of speaking that makes normally unremarkable words like ‘corrosiveness’ seem almost magical in their meaning.

I looked up at him, and then to the sidewalk as I asked, “Oh, is that what that purple stuff is?”

I was too busy focusing on the purple salt crystals to notice Grandfather reaching around me until I felt his hand taking me by the shoulder and squeezing lightly.

“Between you and me, it still tastes positively revolting.” He said with a strong, but short lived laugh.

I looked up at him again. His pipe was back in his mouth, held there by his clenched teeth. The smile I had detected before had been replaced by his normal constipated gloom. Standing so close to him I could detect the sweet aroma of pipe tobacco and booze. However, it wasn’t any kind of booze I’d ever smelled before. On him, it smelled… well, it smelled good.

He gave me another squeeze as he spoke again, “By gum, when I first heard that they were adding beet juice I was understandably intrigued.”

I looked up at him as he spoke.

“After all, beet juice is highly irregular don’t you know boy.” He blew air out of his nose as if trying to clear his sinuses and then continued, “But you have to admit someone, somewhere was mightily clever to come up with that one. What-What!”

He released his grip on my shoulder and patted me affectionately.

“Yes, sir! Mighty clever!” he repeated.

When Grandfather stopped speaking, I waited for him to say something else. When he didn’t, that’s when I decided, I wanted to ask him something totally unrelated.

“Grandfather,” I started. However, once again he interrupted me.

“Hold on a minute boy.” He said, sounding quite un-grandfather like. Actually, the way he said ‘Hold on a minute boy.’ made him sound like a frail old man.

With his one free hand he was patting his shirt pockets. “I’ve got something here that I wanted to ask you about,” he said as he reached into the left breast pocket of his shirt. He pulled out and handed me a small folded piece of paper.

“Don’t suppose you know anything about that, do you boy? What-What!” he asked in his same old grumpy tone.

The paper, which was folded in half, looked as though it had once been wadded into a ball. I unfolded the paper and saw that there was something written on it.

w w w . i l d . c o m

Of course I recognized it instantly as the note that some girl had given me at the rest-stop where Mom had changed me during our trip up to Canada. However, what I didn’t know was how Grandfather had ended up with it. And frankly until he had returned it to me, I had forgotten all about it.

I didn’t know what to say to Grandfather. It was mine, but I had no idea what the website address might contain and I feared, that Grandfather already knew. Then again, Grandfather is pretty old. He might not even know how to work a computer, let alone look up the website address.

I decided that the best action was to fess up. “Yeah it’s mine. Some girl gave it to me, but I’ve not had a chance to check it out yet.”