Bud Grossmann’s Words of the Week for the Week of September 25, 2011 Published as Family History in a Gramma Letter dated September 22, 1998. © 1998 by Bud Grossmann. All Rights Reserved.   Kin, 1998 © 1998 by Bud Grossmann A STORY WITH NUDITY & GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF VIOLENCE Tuesday, September 22, 1998 Dear Gramma,       On a late-summer evening long ago, a noisy battle between boys brought you out of your kitchen and onto the steps of your Wisconsin farm house. Two of your grandsons, Bruce and Terry, imagining themselves to be pirates, were engaged in a “sword” fight out under the Chinese elms. “Put those sticks away right this minute,” you bellowed, “before one of you puts out somebody’s eye!”       The boys obeyed. You went back to washing the supper dishes.       This past Friday, at six o’clock in the morning, my wife, wearing nothing but a clear plastic shower cap, woke me from sleep and informed me that she was unable to enter her shower stall. “Evidently,” Frances informed me, “Elizabeth slammed the shower door last night when you told her she couldn’t go to Annie’s house. Now I can’t get it open.”       Repair of shower doors definitely falls within the purview of the father in this family. I therefore chose not to protest the implication that I somehow shared with our eleven-year-old the responsibility for damage resulting from her tantrum. I got out of bed, put on my glasses, and went into Fran’s bathroom.       The shower door is a single sheet of smoked glass, sixty-six inches by twenty, gripped on the left side by an aluminum bracket that rotates on pivot pins, top and bottom. The door swings open into the bathroom; when it swings closed, its right edge is supposed to snug up against a cushion of rubber along a vertical strip of aluminum fastened to the tiled right-side jamb of the shower stall. Elizabeth’s fury had forced the door a half-inch beyond the rubber-and-aluminum strip. Frances could not get it to come back, and she couldn’t push the door far enough into the stall to squeeze herself past it.       I quickly surveyed the situation and found nothing broken or bent. I theorized that if brute force had propelled the door to its present position, brute force could probably bring it back again. But I was unable to prove my theory by yanking or pounding upon the door. Frances said, “Never mind. Work on this later. Go make breakfast, and I’ll use your shower.”       She left. Elizabeth, sleepy-eyed and shame-faced, replaced her mother as silent observer. I tried another form of force, prying on the door’s edge with a large screwdriver. No luck.       So then I studied the hinges—the pivot pins—and figured out how to disassemble the top one. That did the trick. In a few seconds more, I had the door working good as new.       “Dad, I’m sorry,” Eliz said sincerely.       I hugged her. “No problem,” I said.       But I couldn’t let it go at that. My duty as a dad required me to deliver the standard safety speech titled “You’ll Put Out Someone’s Eye With What You Are Doing.” Kneeling beside my toolbox, I pointed up at the shower door and solemnly told my little girl, “Listen, sweetie, and listen well. If you had slammed that door only a little bit harder, it would have flown from its hinges and shattered against the wall. A shard of glass might have bounced back at you and sliced into your jugular vein”—I stabbed two fingers into my neck to demonstrate. I paused and glared. Then I delivered the last words low and slow: “And you, Elizabeth. You would have died. In a bright. Bloody. Puddle on the floor.”       “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she whispered again.       “You got frustrations, dolly, you can punch a pillow. Hard as you like. But don’t go messin’ with glass, you understand me? I love you. I don’t ever want to see you hurt.”       We hugged again. And, as we did, I thought fondly of you, Grandma Grossmann, and the admirable brevity of your safety lectures.                       Love,                       Buddy         ARCHIVES         Click for a list of other Words of the Week I would welcome your thoughts on this page (or any of my others).  Write to me at the following address.  Please be sure to spell Grossmann with two n’s and mention what page you are writing about. Thanks!  BUD GROSSMANN Top of this page | HOME | Fine Photography | Picture of the Day | Writings | | Words of the Week | Mom & Pop Prop. Mgt. | FAQ |

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