750 words minus about 500

Okay. A scene. That's all I have in me right now. Here goes...

It is summer. It's hot, and although school's been out for only a few weeks so far we are already wandering around complaining of being bored when we aren't at my grandparents' house with our cousins and the pool. This day I was home; I don't remember Alison being around. Maybe she'd gone off to a friend's. My grandfather came over to switch the top of my mother's MG from hard to soft. Or at least I think that's what he was doing; I don't know much about cars. I do know that he was putting a soft top on it: that when he began there was no roof on the car, and when he was done, there was.

I worshipped my grandfather, and there were only so many opportunities one had to be alone with him. For some reason, although I suspect I knew even then, at 13, that this was not a job that would ever be mine, I decided I needed to document what he was doing. I had been watching him gather what he needed, get organized for the job, while standing barefoot on our uncomfortable gravel driveway in my bare feet. In the jerky awkward way it is possible to run on sharp-edged gravel, I ran into the house and emerged with a pad of paper, a medium-sized one, and a pen.

As my grandfather worked, I wrote down what he was doing, asking him when I didn't know. I wrote it out in steps, in an instruction list, like this: 1), 2), 3) and so on. I don't remember what any of the steps were; I am certain I didn't understand them then either. We didn't discuss what I was doing or why. I have no idea where this list is, if it survived, when or if it was thrown away. It was never used. My grandfather died the next day.