The Many Adventures of
Grandma Bernie and
Her Famous Dentures
by Maddy Trumble
My Grandma Bernie was eccentric, to say the least. She was not your typical or ideal mother. She couldn't cook, but tried every day. My mom's lunch bags were stuffed with bacon and peanut butter sandwiches and homemade cake, or what was supposed to be homemade cake. Grandma Bernie was an artist. She painted beautiful pictures of whatever inspired her: a certain landmark or mountain or dog. She was also a pioneer of recycling, beginning in the 1950s, before recycling was even discovered. Her clothes, for the most part, were homemade, mostly by her kids. When my mom was 12, she gave Grandma a dress for Easter. That dress hung in Grandma’s closet for her whole life.
One of the main contributors to her quirkiness were her dentures. She was born in 1918, before the days of fluoridated water and meticulous dental hygiene. So, by the age of 40, Grandma Bernie had a mouth full of fake teeth.
They had always fascinated me as a little kid. She would take them out at night, and let them sit in a cup of water on her bedside table. I often tried to catch a glimpse of the pearly off-whites in the cup. The fact that her teeth took the night off to hang out in some water was beyond my five-year-old grasp. It was quite bemusing, to look back and forth at the teeth and the mouth they were removed from. Teeth in a cup, Grandma Bernie's mouth without them in it. Cup, mouth. Cup, mouth. I was a bit envious of this phenomenon. I wanted the ability to take my teeth out when I wanted- just to see what it would look like.
When my family visited my Grandma for Christmas or Easter, she would come to say goodnight to my brother and I, toothless. She led us in a prayer: "Our Fader. Who Ard in Heben. Hadowed be they name. Dy Kingdom come, dy will be done, on earf asss it isss in Heaben. Give usss thisss day, our daily bwead. And forgive uss our tressspasssesssss…" The Ss would travel out of her mouth in long, slow hisses. While I found the image of Grandma Bernie without any teeth quite amusing, the sounds she created when she attempted to speak were chilling. I said the prayer as loudly as I could in order to drown out her temporary speech impediment, for it sent shivers up my spine. I tried my hardest to think about what I was saying and to really feel the prayer, but my anxiety proved to be too overpowering. I couldn't think about the bread I was asking to receive, or the trespasses I was asking to be forgiven for. All I could think about were the Ss that were being mangled and maimed so unforgivably.
Grandma Bernie's dentures and what she did with them was a popular subject of conversation among the rest of my family. My mom tells me that she would lose them at least once a week. Every time, Grandma accused the dog or cat of swallowing the dentures- as if this was even possible. I'm not sure the dentures would even fit in the cat's mouth, let alone its throat. But nevertheless, the Weaver family cat, Tigger, was the usual suspect. I'm told Grandma would often examine the cat's throw up, convinced that it had been her dentures that had made the cat sick, not a hairball.
Grandma would whip out the detective gear to examine the cat's unwanted business. She snapped on the rubber gloves used for washing dishes, picked up the tweezers, knelt down, her face inches from the floor, and began the investigation. When she couldn't find what she was looking for with merely tweezers and her naked eye, she'd haul out the magnifying glass, and continue to pick through the discharge looking through the glass with her left eye. The magnifying glass was sure to catch the porcelain that the cat had chewed and broken down. After being unsuccessful in her search (as she was every time) she took off the gloves and carefully put the magnifying glass and tweezers back into her detective case and continued with the search for the true offender.
* * *
Once, maybe 40 years ago, when my mother was a little girl, Grandma Bernie took Schnook, the Weaver family dog, to the vet's to get his stomach pumped. See, she had spent the whole weekend tearing the house apart, looking for her misplaced dentures. By this point, Grandma knew that Schnook had swallowed them. Why else wasn't she able to find her teeth?
No one in the family knows just why the nice men and women at the vet agreed to pump the dog's stomach, but they did. Grandma sat patiently in the waiting room, purse clutched in her hands. Some would assume that a grown woman without teeth would be embarrassed about her lack of choppers, and refrain from conversation. Not Grandma Bernie. Up until the day she died, she had the ability to start up a conversation with any person she came across. She could talk about anything: the weather, a book, a great philosopher, what she had eaten for dinner the night before and whether or not it had agreed with her stomach. She was a friendly woman and nothing could keep her from chatting up her neighbor, not even a toothless mouth, complete with the damaged speech.
After the vet had pumped old Schnook's stomach, they brought him out to Grandma and gave her the news. Well! She just could not believe that they hadn't found anything. She had looked everywhere! The dog's stomach was the last possible place the teeth could be!
Disappointed and defeated, Grandma Bernie was handed the bill for the failed stomach pumping. She opened her purse to retrieve her checkbook. As she dug through the papers and makeup, she came across something that felt rather peculiar. She pulled this strange object out and smiled at it. She held the slightly dusty dentures in her hand. "Well! Here dey are!" She proceeded to position the teeth back in her mouth before asking, "Now, how much was that bill?"
* * *
When my mom was a junior at Boston College, Grandma Bernie flew up to visit her and to stay with her in her dorm. Grandma, being the loving, providing mother she was, decided to surprise my Mom and her two roommates by making dinner. Because Grandma Bernie was quite challenged in the cooking department, her best dish was soup. Tomato soup.
My mom and her roommates all came back from class one afternoon to find Grandma Bernie looking under the couch cushions, for, what else, but her teeth. She seemed to have taken them out while cooking but forgot where or when. Grandma and the girls searched for a half hour before Grandma remembered about the soup she had made them.
“Girlsss! I forgot to tewl you. I made sssoup for all of you. Are you hungry?”
My mom looked at her roommates. None of them spoke; they were all thinking the same thing. The teeth must be IN the soup. They surely fell out while Grandma was cooking. My mom had seen the way her mother cooked, stirring furiously, getting a bit too excited as she added heaps of salt and pepper and anything else that came in a shaker. Really, anything else at all. Grandma’s soups weren’t so much soups as they were hearty stews. Grandma Bernie maybe had gotten a bit overzealous, the spices having traveled to her brain and all, and dropped her teeth in too- along with the parsley and herbs.
“Umm… No. We’re not too hungry right now,” my mom said. “We already ate.”
Grandma Bernie frowned. “Oh. Well, all righ. Maybe you can sssave it for anoder day? That’sss what thesse refrigeratorsss are for, righ?”
“Of course!” my mom said, feeling bad for Grandma Bernie. She looked so disappointed in the girls. But they weren’t going to eat soup that had been marinating in Grandma Bernie’s dentures! That was too much to stomach, even for a college student.
Grandma eventually found the teeth sitting in a cup she had put back into the cabinet. Whoops! The roommates ate the soup the next day. But it was a little too salty, and didn’t taste like it had very many tomatoes in it.
* * *
Toward the end of her life, Grandma Bernie had quite a hard time with her health. She had a terrible fall around the time of her 83rd Birthday and ended up having to get her hip replaced. As much as she should have been upset and distraught, she was more upbeat than ever. She was actually excited to get a new hip.
“Every part of me is old. I want something new. I’ll be young again! Finally!” she said.
But then, later on in the process of finding a doctor and the correct replacement, she remembered about her friend, Mildred, who had her hip replaced. The sensor at the airport always went off when she teetered through, because her hip was metal. The more Grandma Bernie thought about this, the more apprehensive she became. She was concerned about all the delays her fake hip would cause her.
“It will slow me down,” she said.
“No. It will speed you up, actually. You’re not going to get around too easily with a broken hip,” my mom told her.
“Well, it will be such trouble when I have to fly somewhere.”
“When do you have to fly?”
“I fly plenty.”
“Okay,” my mom said, dropping it.
After all this worrying, Grandma Bernie was quite relieved to learn her new hip would be plastic and rubber- not made of metal at all. Thank goodness! Her traveling experiences would not suffer.
So, Grandma Bernie got her hip replaced at Saint Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco. They were the best plastic hip replacers in the greater Bay Area. And it was here that Grandma Bernie lost her dentures for good.
For several days after her surgery, Grandma was still heavily medicated. And naturally, her older body was having a hard time handling the drugs. Her hip might have been new, but her system wasn’t.
One morning, after getting sick in the middle of the night, Grandma Bernie woke up without any teeth in her mouth. She immediately called the nurse into her room to ask what had happened in the middle of the night, for she didn’t remember. The nurse told her that she had gotten sick, but everything was okay now.
“Where are my teeth? I need my teeth!”
“Mrs. Weaver? You lost your teeth?” the nurse asked.
“I don’t know where they are!”
My mom arrived a little while later to check on my Grandma and was immediately informed of the situation. After speaking with the nurses, my mom found out about what was going on.
At this point, Grandma Bernie was rather distraught. She didn’t know where her dentures had gone. All the nurses searched furiously for them, actually removing Grandma from her bed at one point to look under the pillows and sheets. After about an hour or so of hunting for the teeth, my mother talked to the nurse who had dealt with Grandma during the night. She went through what had happened, step-by-step.
"She got sick in the pile of towels that was next to her bed. And then, um, I took the towels and put them in the laundry. Then I went back in the room to clean up anything else. I didn't see anything else, so I didn't think there was anything else. I might have been wrong."
"You put the towels in the wash?" my mom asked the nurse.
"Uh-huh. I put the towels in the… Oh!"
My mom nodded her head, realizing what had happened. Grandma Bernie's teeth must have come out with her hospital dinner. They fell in the towel and the nurse hadn't noticed. They were in the laundry right now!
"Where is the laundry?" my mom quickly asked the nurse.
"Laundry? The tenth floor."
My mom took off running. Grandma Bernie’s room was on the fourth floor. She had six flights to climb to reach the lost dentures that were probably going round and round in the wash already. My mom climbed the stairs two at a time, panting and sweating, until she reached the tenth floor. She ran into the laundry room, and looked around, not knowing how to go about asking what she needed to ask.
Then she spotted a laundry-gal, and approached her. My mom too, could have a conversation with anyone.
"I'm wondering where the laundry from the fourth floor is? It was sent up in the middle of the night."
"Well," the young girl said, rolling her eyes. "We don't do the first load until 7:00. But that was like five hours ago, so, uh… yeah. It's already been washed. Why? Wachoo want?" she said harshly.
"Are you sure? I need something that was put in the wash. It's important."
"Yeah. Everything's been washed. For reals."
My mom didn’t want to give up, but realized the teeth probably hadn't survived the washer or dryer. She imagined what they would have looked like, and even better, what Grandma would have looked like with the cracked and chipped teeth in her mouth. My mom pictured her smiling and going about her daily business with her new teeth, and couldn't help laughing.
Naturally, Grandma had to buy new teeth. This was a huge problem for my Grandma because she didn’t like to spend money on anything. Which is silly, because she had a lot of it. But she was saving it all for her children. She wanted to leave them with something. She refused to buy anything she didn’t need. She bought only Fig Newtons, Folgers, English Muffins, Margarine, and Sensodyne. She never bought clothes- she got them for Christmas. When I was a little girl, she lost about forty pounds. Even then, she didn’t buy new clothes. She just altered everything. She also wore a lot of belts. So, having to buy new teeth was a fairly hard concept for her to grasp. Especially because they were $3,000. She told my mom she couldn’t afford them, so she didn’t need them.
“Mom! Okay- underwear, maybe you don’t need. But teeth? You NEED teeth. How ridiculous!” said my mom.
“They’re too expensive,” my Grandma replied.
“Well, yeah, they are expensive, but you need them. How are you going to eat?”
“I’ll eat soft foods. That’s all right.”
“No! You’re getting teeth. I’ll pay for them if I have to.”
“Well don’t be ridiculous, Barbara. Please! Let’s be reasonable.”
My mom responded with a sigh.
So finally, after much persuasion, Grandma Bernie bought teeth, the cheapest ones she could get. My mom made her promise she would try to keep track of these ones. And she did.
Sadly, that was the last time Grandma Bernie ever lost her teeth. She died a little while after getting her hip replaced. It was Christmas day, 2004. I wish she could have stayed longer, maybe lost her teeth a couple more times. But maybe it’s better now. I don’t think you can lose your teeth in heaven. It’s far too complicated.