What happens when you mix up a random euchre night with parental concern? Good question. I have the answer.

So my tooth is gone. Replaced by weird sensations and stitches I can tease with my tongue (until today). Trying to make me feel better my dad launches into a stranger than fiction tale about his father (another Rudi). There’s a birthday. Someone from the factory. After work a group is getting together to celebrate. My grandfather is invited and he decides to go. It’s at a local pub. The names of the establishments are hilarious (Stamm am Lamm; Oxen … as an example). In any event he goes. The celebration includes a few shots; everyone included. Apparently my grandfather is a light weight and can’t handle hard liquor. Oops.

He leaves the party early knowing he’s had his limit and then some …. on the way home he’s walking from the pub to his house. He arrives to his home later than expected and his wife questions him. Where have you been? What happened? My grandfather tries to answer. He’s blotto. My grandmother gasps: where are your teeth???? Between pub and hone his teeth are missing. My grandmother presses for facts. It is clear he’s drunk and now also clear he list his teeth while barfing on the way home.

Grandfather hits the bed. Grandmother and son (my dad) retrace the way home in search of barf containing teeth. Crazily they find the barf and the teeth. Retrieval is a success; disaster averted.

My tooth cannot be found. Ever.

So the other night … completely unrelated…. we are invited to play socially distant euchre with another couple. We know them from pickleball. We arrive with our appetizers and enjoy a pre game cocktail outside on the deck. Our hostess and her boyfriend are very social and talkative. After some benign small talk somehow the conversation turns to his (our hosts boyfriends) wardrobe. Apparently he has somewhat eclectic taste in apparel.

She has tried to sway his preferences for Hawaiian shirts and bought him a brightly coloured linen shirt. He’s definitely able to wear bright hues as his olive toned skin and full head of salt and pepper hair suit pizzazz. However he was cautioned to wash the new shirt gently and hand dry.

Not.

He bundled it with other stuff and let the Maytag go crazy. The result? A shrunken wrinkly mess. Dry cleaner to the rescue. He’s lucky to find a business who understands his plight and offers a solution. Enter the torso.

The shrunken mess of a shirt is dampened and then placed on the torso. The torso is slowly inflated to stretch the shirt to the desired size. Are you kidding me??

For the rest of the evening I giggled about the torso. What a concept. No face. No brain. No voice. Just a torso that grows to the right size and fixes the problem.

I might not need an implant tooth. Just a torso.