TREASURE OF TIME

TREASURE OF TIME (complete story)

TREASURE OF TIME

I woke up that morning to my Mom's panicked cry for my father; something was wrong. "Roger, get down here, quick! Dad's gone! Dad isn't here, I can't find him anywhere! Roger..."

My brother climbed down out of the bunk above me and the two of us sprinted for the bedroom door.

Dad was rubbing the sleep from his eyes and trying awkwardly not to trip on the rug as he made his way to the stairs.

Mom was on her way up the stairs to come to get him. The two of them met in the middle. Mom was sobbing something about Grandpa.

I thought for a moment that he had died in his sleep and that she had made that horrible discovery. Grandpa was living with us now and had a room of his own on the first floor, just off of the den. He had to come to live with us a year after Grandma had passed. His health was steadily getting worse as he grieved the loss of his one and only true love.

Grandpa was older than dirt, as my dad would say, and he spent most of his time with his nose inside a book. Seems he was always reading something. It was something he and Grandma shared a passion for and since her death, it was all he did. Maybe he felt closer to her when he was absorbed in a good book. It had to be difficult for him to focus on the print, his eyes were so bad he had to wear those thick magnifying eyeglasses just to see his hand in front of his face much less, the small words typed on a page in a book.

Our Grandpa was a slight man with a round butt that seemed to balance his round belly. His legs were so skinny that Michael and I wondered how long he could stand before they would just snap in two.

"Marky," he'd say to me, "help me to the bathroom, will ya?" I'd help lift him out of his favorite chair and we'd both hobble together, arm in arm, the dozen or so steps it would take to reach the bathroom door.

"Wait for me Marky, would you?" he would ask. "I won't be long."

Jeez, sometimes I would stand there for fifteen minutes or more. I loved my Grandpa. The memories of him as a younger man, carrying me on his shoulders through the crowds at the fair, or taking us to the pond to fish from that old Jon- boat, made me smile.

It was always a treat to be with Grandpa, even now. He could tell the best stories. Michael and I would sit entranced for hours listening to his stories about all the places he had visited when he was a "student of the world," as he would tell it.

Michael is my older brother by a year and a half.

He will be a seventh-grader this year and I'm in the fifth grade. According to him, I'll be studying many of the same places that Grandpa has told us about. It will be extra special because we have already seen these places in our imaginations.

Grandpa had a way with a story. You could close your eyes and imagine the places he told us about. He would give us picture-perfect words so we could visualize as we listened. Yep, that's what he called them, "picture-perfect words."

But this story trumps them all.

Michael looked at me as we were standing frozen at the top of the stairs, "Grandpa?" he mumbled to himself and then turned to me. "Missing?"

"I think that's what she said," I mumbled back.

The two of us bounced down the steps to where Mom and Dad were now holding each other. Mom was crying inconsolably into dad's shoulder.

"Come on, Maggie," he said to her as he slowly escorted her down into the kitchen and helped her to her chair at the table. "Boys, go upstairs and get dressed. We need to look for Grandpa."