Note that this is the first of two or three posts for today. I am not sure to what you owe this web-logging bonanza, but you can thank your lucky stars for it. Ha ha.

I had just gotten some clothes out of the dryer and was folding them on the kitchen table where my grandfather was eating a bowl of Cheerios. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Folding my laundry,” I said.

“That’s women’s work,” he said.

“Find me a woman, and I’ll hand it off,” I said.

“Good boy,” he said. I hate folding laundry, so I would have turned it over to a wild bandicoot if it could correctly match the socks, but I get further with my grandfather if I just play along with whatever is going through his octogenarian head. He stared at me for a few seconds and said, “Who does the cooking, you or your, uh, friend?”

I did not bat an eye, but that was an historic moment: the first time my grandfather alluded to Rob as someone with whom I share a home and familiar domestic chores. “He does,” I said. “I can’t cook.”

“I can’t, either,” he said.

He then spent a half hour telling stories of how he treated his Japanese prisoners of war during World War Two.