My sister liked looking at the board games and puzzles. Anything less than a thousand piece puzzle would be far too elementary for her. She liked the tough ones she could hunch over for hours.
I, on the other hand, never had a lot of interest in the garage sales. I would wait by the car and mill around while my mom sized up the goods to see if there were clothes that matched the current sizes of any of her kids. Inevitably she would come back to the car with some piece of clothing that did not exactly work for us. Bell-bottom pants just as they were going out of style or suede Hush Puppies when we really wanted clogs or Moon Boots. Nothing was ever quite right.
She’d excitedly hand us the prizes and remind us to NEVER EVER tell anyone we were wearing garage sale clothes. And her shame in dressing us in second hand clothes would always ruin any good feeling we might possibly get out of the items. I’d sit at my school desk and feel like I was wearing a dirty secret.
Every once in a while however I would creep up to a sale and take a look at what they had. I would find something like an oversized stuffed pink bear for five-cents. One day, when I was about five or six, I found something so unique to my little mind that I asked my mom if she could help me get it. It was a dentures cup. It cost 10 cents and she gave me the money to buy it. It was a special dentures cup because it had a lid that snapped on and a little plastic spoon that snapped onto the lid. You could use this spoon to scoop the bubbling cleaning powder that you added to the water. And the other special feature on this ivory plastic cup was the word DENTURES inscribed on the side. This way people would not take a swig out of the cup while your teeth were bubbling themselves clean.
I knew my grandma had false teeth. I had seen them. Late one night she simply pop that detachable teeth plate out of her mouth and dropped it into a prepared cup of water. As if it were no big deal.
When I gave the dentures cup to her she accepted it with such honor. As if it were the best gift she had ever received in her life. And there I was, beaming with pride. I had done good.
Grandma never shamed me for giving her a second-hand personal hygiene product. Instead she kept the dentures cup in the kitchen, near the sink where I would see it. From then on I could watch her open the cup, fill it with warm tap water, snap off the little spoon, carefully scoop the powder into the water and then drop her ivory studded, peachy false teeth into the cup. They would drift down to the bottom of the cup as the bubbles popped up to the top. It was a nightly ritual I tried not to miss when I was at her house.
It was a good thing too because years later, when I was nursing her through her final months, those teeth were my responsibility. I would rinse them off after each meal to keep food morsels from hurting her gums and drop them in the bubbling water at the end of her day.
