Our Grand Finale by Laraine Denny Burrell

Author:Laraine Denny Burrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2017-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

After living and working for six months in Cairo, the dance group is moving on to Iran. But not me. I realize I have a health problem. It has been plaguing me for a couple of months, making me uneasy, and I decide it will be best to go home to England. I say goodbye to my friends, to my wandering lifestyle, to the fun and freedom, and book my ticket home. With Mimis promising to phone me often and offering me anything that I might need, I go home to face the consequences.

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

The high-pitched scream unexpectedly cuts into the quiet of the morning, reverberating around the house, its echo bouncing off the walls. It sounds like Mum. It comes from upstairs and is followed by a torrent of cursing in a Scottish brogue: yep, definitely Mum. I bound up the stairs, hastened by the shocking timbre of the cry, and find Mum in her bedroom.

“Would you look at that?” my mother says, pointing toward a drawer at the side of the bed. “Gave me the fright of my life!”

I look into the drawer and laugh. Inside are multiple pairs of false teeth, pink gums and white teeth all grinning up at us as if laughing at the practical joke they had just played.

“He wouldn’t throw a thing away.” Mum shakes her head. “Well, they’re going in the bin now.”

She pulls out the drawer and unceremoniously tips its contents into a bin, the act accented by the clatter of hard plastic hitting the metallic side of the bin.

I think to myself, This was typical Dad, always the comedian, making my childhood a compendium of banter, witticisms, and jokes. Dad’s false teeth would often become the center of much jocularity, particularly when he had had a few drinks. He would amuse us all by playing with his dentures, pulling faces to make us laugh. Here he was still playing the jokester, even after he was gone. I look down at these personal items to be discarded as trash, their usefulness over, their relevance to my father’s life and my own memories finished. A twinge of sadness hides below my laugh. Of course we have to let go of the belongings that had accessorized my father’s life. We have to physically and permanently remove the tangible evidence of his existence. It is a natural part of the healing process.

The false teeth don’t end with the drawer. Over the next couple of days as I help sort through my dad’s things, I find more and more pairs: in the pockets of his Mackintosh (why he had a pair there was anyone’s guess), in a box stored high on a kitchen shelf, and in a tin in the garage. My father had lost his teeth when he had childhood rheumatic fever; over the next sixty-plus years, he had worn dentures and, apparently, kept every one of the sets he had used during his lifetime. They are an odd historical collection not only of how

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