My grandpa

My grandpa is a legendary prankster.

When my mom was a teenager, she worked at an ice cream parlor in Mount Gretna, Pennsylvania called The Jigger Shop. (It’s still a thing.)

As the story goes, her manager was exacting. There were strict standards for every bowl and cone constructed, with rigid requirements pertaining to the distribution of materials. As a server, it was critical that you did not overload a cone with too much ice cream, too many sprinkles, or – and this particular instruction was communicated with exaggerated clearness – too many scoops of wet walnuts.

Oh, yes. Attaining a precise measurement of wet walnuts was very important.

Very, very important.

To hear my mom tell it, wet walnuts were near sacred. Servers were hired primarily to protect them, so that to be a Jigger Shop employee was like working at a bank vault or being stationed as the King’s Guard at Buckingham Palace. The chaos of hell was held back only by the safeguarding of the nuts, and if servers were to fail – if wet walnuts were lost, or (unthinkably worse) poured out willy nilly – the very existence of The Jigger Shop would be threatened.

This, it seems, is what the manager of The Jigger Shop drilled into my mother’s head. I suppose walnuts were rather expensive at the time.

So my mom went home from her training and told her parents about the high value of wet walnuts, relaying with excitement the utmost importance of their proper rationing. My grandpa listened attentively. Then he went to the grocery store and bought a ton of wet walnuts.

You might see where this is going.

Some time later, my grandpa went to The Jigger Shop with a bag of the sacred material tucked into a pocket. He innocently purchased an ice cream. Then he dumped the entire bag of wet walnuts onto it.

He spilled them onto his otherwise exactly-measured ice cream, and as they cascaded from his serving like an overflowing river of tree nut gold, he sought out the manager of the shop to strike up a casual conversation.

He made small talk.

My grandpa made no mention of his obvious abundance of wet walnuts. But as he ate the ice cream, he brandished it beneath the manager’s nose. The manager was captivated like a mother witnessing horrible bloodshed or a Baptist watching Sam Smith: utterly distressed, unable to look away.

My grandpa finished his ice cream and went home.

I imagine the manager went apoplectic.

And that’s that.

I’ve heard this story (and many like it) a million times.

There’s the time my grandpa turned a kitchen staff against itself by sabotaging food orders. The time he horribly misled a bathroom attendant. The time he and his friends stole buckets of baseballs from a major leaguer. All these pranks are stitched into the fabric of my family, because in addition to being a legendary prankster, my grandpa is a legendary storyteller, too.

Last night, my mom texted me to say that grandpa fell.

He pushed the alarm on his bracelet to summon an ambulance, and the crew took him to the hospital with a fever of 104 degrees. He’s nearly 90 now. He’s lived alone since my grandma died. Over the past few days, he hasn’t been eating or drinking very much, so he’s pretty dehydrated, and it looks like he might have a kidney infection.

Time’s a funny thing. From the first moment I can remember him, my grandpa seemed elderly to me, a retired doctor who moved slowly and told jokes with an old man’s gravelly voice. But I’ve always had this image of him as a young man, too, because I’ve heard so many of his stories.

I’m glad to have that image. It’s grounding.

I don’t know the ending to my grandpa’s story. But I sure do know the ending to The Jigger Shop story, and to so (so) many others. And because of the faith that my grandpa and grandma passed on to my mom, I know the ending to the biggest story of all, too.

God is good. Walnuts are expensive. I love my grandpa, and we’ll see what happens.