Nicole Tasker Woods

I had a free minute at work yesterday afternoon so I grabbed a post-it and a pen and began to make a list:

• weather
• car
• what we did this weekend
• Sophie/Cali

Then I dialed my Grandpa’s home phone number to have a brief chat. I like to check in on him, make sure he is doing ok and give him the scoop on what has been going on in my life.

If I am not prepared, he will rapid-fire questions at me that only require a one word answer and before I know it, he is rushing me off the phone and all I hear is the dial tone. It isn’t that he doesn’t like me, I’m sure I am his favorite granddaughter 🙂 but he has never been a phone chit-chat kind of guy. In person, he can yack your ear off until the cows come home, but when you call him, he obviously has more important things to do than talk to you. Sometimes I think it is because he can not hear very well, after all, he is coming up on 90 years old this September, can you blame him? But he always hears me just fine as long as I use a powerful voice. Not necessarily loud, just a bit forceful. For this reason, I have to strategically plan when to make these calls to him.

He is always so fascinated with how much it costs to call him from my cell phone. Not about the party we had this weekend, what is going on at work or the new tires on my car, nope–he does not care about that stuff; he always comes back to my cell phone. The fact that I pay monthly for 1,000 minutes instead of X amount per minute, that sounds like such a great deal to him.

The list I made prior to calling came in handy because when we finished one topic, I moved us on to the next to keep the conversation going. I think I hit a record when we got to four minutes before he had to hang up and read whatever with his magnify glass or what whatever court TV show was coming on at that moment.