Remembering Granny

In terms of straightforward coolness, no one comes close to a lady very near and dear to my heart: my Grandma. In fact, I would venture to say that everything I need to know, I learned from my Grandma. These important things include advice about right and wrong, manners and tips on saving money.

For instance, her philosophy in the kitchen was: "WHY SPEND MONEY ON TUPPERWARE WHEN YOU'VE GOT HUNDREDS OF PERFECTLY GOOD MARGARINE CONTAINERS JUST LAYING AROUND?" So every time I went over for a meal, she would pull six or seven different faded plastic containers out of the fridge and put them in the microwave. None of us (including her) had a clue as to what was inside them, but that kind of made for a fun evening. It was a sort of blind buffet: "Wow, look at that! Ham, rice and something brown, all heated to microwaved perfection! DIG IN!" This prepared me for my career as a bachelor.

The more contact I had with Granny, the more I learned. It follows, then, that staying for holidays was like going to summer school, but to learn things I would actually find helpful in life. For instance, as a boy of eight years old I was a real novice when it came to handling curfews while away from home. Gram solved that problem by having NO CURFEW WHATSOEVER. In fact, the only way she knew it was time for me to go to bed was when I was already asleep on the floor. And watching Three's Company is okay at eight o'clock but if we waited just a few more hours, we could watch Jack Lord and his big hair wave on Hawaii Five Oh. And Buddy Ebsen in Barnaby Jones. And some really porcine guy as Cannon. And Oscar Madison as Quincy. Then I'd spend the next hour in bed alone, listening to all the sounds of the night, convinced someone wearing a dark leather glove was going to slowly open MY door, stick his hand into the room and shoot ME with a silencer. By morning I'd be exhausted but that was okay because Grandma always said: "IF YOU STAY UP LATE WATCHING TELEVISION, THE BEST THING TO DO IN THE MORNING IS SLEEP IN!"

Now I need to say right here that my grandmother was a church-going person. However, having grown up on the farm, she was also endowed with a vocabulary of words that one would find surprising for a little old lady. Her way of getting around any issues of appropriate language was to slightly change the pronunciation of the word in question, thereby tricking everyone. What does a cat do in the garden? It SHITES! I have to admit there were days when I would purposely bring up the subject of cats just to hear Grandma 'swear.'

Another pearl of wisdom that will long remain in my heart is this: "IT'S OKAY TO PASS WIND AS LONG AS YOU BLAME IT ON IMAGINARY ANIMALS." For as long as I can remember, my granny had this 'duck' that followed her everywhere. It was pretty much invisible but every once in a while, as she was walking down the hall, we would HEAR it and Gram would say, "Oh there's that duck again!" Try as we might, we never had so much as a partial sighting. In retrospect, while Granny's companion was a duck, it seemed my grandfather was stalked by a MOOSE. I have no idea how we could ever miss this creature who, by the sound of it, was the size of a house.

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