Cold Toast

My grandpa always ate cold toast.
It is one of the most vivid memories I have of him.

Cold. Toast.

In our happy, busy home (the same one I live in now, actually) we lived in true Full-House-style, complete with my mom, brother, aunt, two Irish grandparents & myself...all under one roof. We got along beautifully, said 'I Love You' every time someone walked out a door and all had our little quirks. My sweet little grandma, who grew up in Dublin during the Great Depression, regularly fed us things like porridge, fish-sticks & mushy peas, which we would choke down to get to her unbelievably delicious oatmeal cookies. My mom would paint late at night in her workshop, had crazy nicknames for all our pets and my grandpa loved to play table-top hockey, using coffee creamers & a rolled-up paper ball, with my brother when we went out for meals. The adults in my life worked hard during the week and my brother and I spent most of our free-time riding bikes with our neighbours out on the street. I cherish my childhood memories.

And one of them will always be...Papa's cold toast.

I remember it most at breakfast time; we'd all be buzzing around getting ready for school or work and my grandma, always awake before everyone else, would faithfully place two slices of rye bread into the toaster, to get Papa's breakfast started. The toast would soon pop and my grandma would pull each piece out, slowly, with a paring knife (which always made me nervous, as we were taught never to put anything that wasn't toast in the toaster!). She, then, would carefully place each slice inside of a silver toast rack, bring it to the kitchen table and move on with preparing everyone else's meals.

"George! Toast is ready!", she'd holler down the hallway as he'd slowly saunter into the solarium (Papa was never in a hurry).  He'd usually bend down to kiss one of us on the head to say good morning, give our big, furry cat, Patches, a scratch and then pull up his seat for breakfast, right at the head of the table.

I can still recall the sound of his bone-handled butter knife scraping the cold toast with the even-colder butter.

"Crunch!". He'd dig in. He'd always eat slowly, wipe his mouth politely, then thank Nanny for breakfast and go straight down to his study to read the Bible for the rest of the morning. A habit that modelled his deep commitment to the Lord.

It's a picture I could paint you clearly, every time you asked about it... Papa's cold toast.
This man who raised me from birth, as a father, when I had none. This man who was called a "giant of the faith" at his funeral by many a friend and comrade. This man who faithfully prayed for our family every single morning, without fail; whose life and dedication to the Lord was biography-worthy, and yet every time I think of him, I can't shake this memory of cold toast for breakfast.

...and today I wondered why.

Why does that memory stick out just as clear (clearer, actually) than many of the things he said to me or even things like him watching my baptism or other milestone-moments he was there for?

Perhaps it's because things like these -- regular, mundane, everyday things -- are the stuff of life. The things we repeat. The lives we live. What we do most regularly and without thinking — our habits. Maybe not the most notable but the most noticed? These things make up so much of who we are, especially in the eyes of our children.

Of course there are the big, unforgettable milestones in a life and the valleys we walk through —those are sure to stick with us. There are the jobs we do and the places we go, the faiths we profess and the opinions we carry; but, I have to say, those things about my precious grandparents are faint memories, compared to the little things that made up our lives, together. The cold toast, the mushy peas, the table-top hockey.

Those little, everyday things add up to big, lasting memories of who we were in the minds of our children — and their meaning may be more than we give them credit for.  My grandma waking up so early to make us all breakfast showed me how much she loved us. My mom’s painting and crazy cat nicknames (seriously, ask me about them sometime) modelled her amazing creativity & joyful, free-spiritedness (which I admire and aspire to, today) and my grandpa’s hockey games with the coffee creamers at restaurants left a forever-memory, for me, of his understanding of and commitment to the role of “dad” for two small children who needed it so badly.

Naturally, it gets me thinking - what is my ‘cold toast’? What will my son remember about me when he is married and thinking back on the life we are living right now?

Of course we all hope to be remembered as the loving, hard-working, supportive parent/grandparent/friend, and that is very likely to happen - but what everyday things do we do that will also linger in the rear-view mirrors of their minds?

Will he remember how I liked to stay up late? My homemade mocha-brownies that he loves so much? How much I loved our picnic table card games? Will he remember how I always got so mad when I stubbed my toe?

— and what will it all mean to him?

It was a sobering realization for me, today, that my life is being monitored. If I didn't think it mattered, the little ways I live, I was reminded this morning, as I watched the butter melt on my son's toast, that it sure does.

Maybe it's putting your feet up on the coffee table, or how you knit during the evening news. How you always went for your morning walk, the way you answered the phone or always left cupboard doors open (hello!). Maybe it was how you gossiped about the neighbours or how you always yelled at the barking dog next door. I don't what it is for your children or what it will be for mine, but I know it matters. I know those everyday things that they are witnessing are a lot more memorable than they seem.

I know that I can't remember many of the conversations or convictions that my grandparents had but I'll always remember the bedtime stories, the family dinners & how they were 10 minutes early to pick us up from school, every single time — and the love that showed.

Like a path forged in my mind by the repetitive motion of their faithfulness, they etched themselves in my heart by the ways in which they chose to live, day-in, day-out. Cold toast and all.