Peeing on Your Toothpaste

Dear TEAMS,

I don’t have a lot of memories of my maternal grandmother, your great-grandmother, Elsie Leoma Rayle.  By the time I was realizing there was a world outside myself as a young teenager, Alzheimer’s had already stripped away most of who I knew of her.  I know she loved me.  I know she prayed for me.

I do have a vivid memory from when I was 8 years old.  She and my grandfather, Fred D Rayle, had come to take care of us 4 kids while my parents went to India for 3 weeks.  One night, she let me in the bathroom with her while she did her nighttime routine.  Fascinated, I watched her squeeze just a small smear of Pepsodent toothpaste on her toothbrush and she painstakingly brushed all her teeth.  Then, to my horror, she pulled out her bridge (a metal brace worn across the top of her mouth that had 2 molars on each side to replace the teeth that had been pulled) and brushed it as well.  I’m sure she created an object lesson out of it about why I should brush my teeth every morning and evening, a practice I chose not to do as a child and was not really enforced too much.

The thing is, when it came time to spit, she lifted the toilet seat and spit into the toilet!  And then, she used only a little water to rinse her toothbrush thoroughly, using her thumb to clean out the bristles.  Next, she wet a washcloth and washed her face—whether she used soap, I don’t remember and again, taking care to conserve with rinsing the cloth out and squeezing it.  Then, I was scooted out of the bathroom where she could empty her bladder (my grandmother would have never said “peed”) on top of the toothpaste spit in the toilet, so that one flush took all the waste away.  I was aghast!

Both my grandparents grew up on farms in Ohio.  My grandfather went to Yale and my grandmother to Findlay College, as it was called then.  Choosing pastoral work, my mother (your Grandma K), was born in Celina, Ohio in 1933.  A pastor during the depression with a baby…doesn’t get much poorer.

I tell you all this because my grandmother had a very real need to pee on her toothpaste at one time in her life.  Economizing meant food and having basic needs met.  Not economizing was choosing starvation.  Thankfully, with their mean beginnings, once they were married it wasn’t too much of a stretch to live frugally.  I have been the benefactor of this knowledge, passed down through my mother, and have written down some lists to pass along in the next few posts about them.  There are wonderful books with even more tips.  But these are ones I have adopted and were necessary in the beginnings of my marriage, too.  I continue with them because it makes sense.

You will note that peeing on your toothpaste is not one of them.

Love,