Grandma made whole-wheat toast for Grandpa every morning and spread margarine on it while it was still warm. What was left over remained on a plate on the kitchen table. Cold toast saturated with cold margarine! As a child, I thought Grandpa’s cold toast was a delicatessen and was pleased when he said I could eat it. Maybe I liked it because my parents rarely bought whole-wheat bread. Maybe I thought it was good because Grand-pa liked it. Today it’s hard for me to imagine how good I found it then.

Fried eggs, sunny side up, bacon that wasn’t crispy, and toast were Grandpa’s staples for breakfast. Grandpa would eat the white of the egg first and then use his knife to pop the whole yoke into his mouth. Grandma loved to tell about the times that he missed!

Grandma and Grandpa always ate margarine instead of butter for reasons unknown to me. In those days “ole” – as they called it – didn’t look at all like butter. The dairy state of Minnesota prohibited adding yellow coloring to the white vegetable oleomargarine. Sometimes they bought “ole” in plastic bags into which yellow food coloring could be injected. And every time they visited Frances and Philip in St. Louis, they brought back a huge supply of already colored “ole”.

Imitating Grandpa, I played with a miniature version of his pipe. I remember at least one time that Grandpa blew his pipe smoke though my little pipe. To this day, whenever I think about it I get that same bitter taste in my mouth that I got then. Yuck!