My Summer Vacation in a Nutshell

This is for you, Larry, my 90-year-old grandmother says. She's rummaging in her purse, which is really a beat-up canvas bag, until she finds it: a plastic urinal, the kind they give men in hospital beds so they can piss supine. My dad accepts the unwashed plastic port-a-pisser reluctantly.

It was your father's, my grandmother says.