A memory that often, more than not, resurfaces in my mind is the time my aunt and I snuck into my grandfather’s room to find what he calls his smoking thing. So, my grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and so he would always have a fixation, and one of his fixations on a specific memory, was his time when he used to smoke. And so of course, we didn’t let him smoke an actual cigarette, we ended up getting him a vape pen that was mostly always empty, but in his head, he thought he was smoking. But he was constantly, like my grandmother says, “A two-year-old with a bottle,” he lost it constantly.

One day, my aunt was looking for it, and she asked me to be the lookout while he was sitting on the front porch. And I remember standing in the entrance of both the living room and the hallway where his bedroom was and keeping my eye on the front screen door while my aunt was going through his drawer. And first, she couldn’t find it. All you heard was rumbling, and for a split second, I looked to help her. I didn’t realize that he was coming through the door, and everything seemed to like slow down and happen in slow motion. My aunt ran out of the room, tripped in the hallway, and fell. The reason that she did that was because, since I was the look out, I had to give her a call that he was coming. So, I remember saying, “Wootty woo!” and she just took off out of the room, tripped, fell down the hallway, and we laughed. And my mother was in her room because we had all lived in the house. She was like, “What are you two doing?” So that was one of my fondest memories.