Keeping on when you’re getting on

I like being around older people, and I always have. Always. When I was a little girl, I adored my grandfather for the way he adored us grandkids. He popped his false teeth out of his mouth and gulped them back in, only we didn’t know they were false, so you can imagine how impressed we were. He shook our hands so hard our arms nearly fell off our bodies, saying, How do! How do! How do! while we giggled helplessly. He lifted us onto his lap and let us listen to baseball on the transistor radio with him. He once pulled a tick off of my head barehanded, and with nary a shudder. (Even more spectacularly, the way he was able to achieve this was to put a lit cigarette to the rear end of the tick, who backed out promptly. Talk about your precision technology!) Best of all, my grandfather didn’t mind our kissing his dog on the lips; he did it, too.