The Contact

For one moment, he remembered.

When I was twelve, my mother’s estranged father showed up on our doorstep.

He had left my grandmother during the Depression. He married other women over the years. I don’t know how many.

Then he developed Alzheimer’s.

His final wife found our address and, without warning, dropped him off at our house. Gravel flew as she peeled out of our driveway. A tall, skinny old man in a bow tie, holding a suitcase, stood in the dust.

Somehow, my mother recognized the father she hadn’t seen since she was eight.

At the time, his ex-wife—my grandmother—was living with us.

They had been divorced for fifty years.

That made for some awkward family dinners.

I had never been around Alzheimer’s. I’m not even sure I knew what it was. I only knew that he shuffled. That he would sit on top of me on the couch. He wandered the house at night and sometimes ended up in the wrong bed.

I have only one good memory of the man I did not know.

My sister was sixteen. She dropped her brand-new contact lens down the bathroom sink.

She panicked.

She cried.

She was sure it was gone—and that she’d be in trouble.

We stood there, helpless.

Without saying a word, my grandfather knelt and took the drain apart.

I’m not sure where he got the tools. I’m not sure how he remembered what to do. But he knew.

And he found it.

He lifted that tiny, clear lens on the tip of his finger.

My sister grabbed it and hugged him.

It was probably the only time any of us made deliberate physical contact with him.

And he did something I had never seen him do.

He smiled.

He was happy.

He was the hero.

For one moment, he wasn’t a man losing his memory.

He wasn’t a burden dropped off at the home of strangers.

He was someone who knew how to fix something.

Someone who was needed.

That was the only moment we truly made contact, and it was over a contact lens.