COLUMN: Grandma’s Travels
Grandma didn’t have Internet access or cable TV. She wasted time the old fashioned way, she stared out the window. In her final years I’m sure she saw more amazing things through her imagination than I did with my 489 channels of cable and broadband Web access.
Grandma mostly watched a housing complex go up across the street from her retirement home. She says she always saw dark men lurking around the house night and day. She was also sure the young orderlies were stealing her underwear and it was “the blacks” who shot JFK. Grandma was prejudice and never apologized for it once. The country was going to Hell and there were plenty of first-class seats left in the hand basket.
Before grandma tuned out and turned on to window gazing, she watched game shows and read The National Enquirer. While most of us have occasionally been lured into the Enquirer while waiting in the checkout line, she is the only person I ever knew who actually subscribed to it. This may explain how her later life hallucinations evolved. Thinking of her makes me wonder what form all my hours of Star Trek, MTV and Nike commercials will take in the less-lucid moments of my twilight years.
Grandma never drove a car and only flew in an airplane once, and that was a bi-plane. Nonetheless, her powers of time travel through her window on the world could exceed anything a starship or worm hole had to offer. On a good day she could remember what grandpa wore on their first date. On a bad day she couldn’t remember her only grandson’s name. She was the only person I allowed to call me “Denny.”
At about age 60, Grandma started to think it was great sport to take us out to see her “plot” at the cemetery on Sunday afternoons. This was not unusual for grandma since she always planned ahead. Grandma had a 12-year supply of Jell-O and cake mixes in her basement. She had enough coat hangers to start her own dry cleaners, enough unread newspapers to choke a small landfill and a coffin-sized freezer full of long-forgotten meat of unknown origin.
At age 70 when I had suggested she take up hang gliding, drag racing, smoking and indiscriminate dating, grandma declared she had become a vegetarian for health reasons. I always suspected it was more a way of spiting my late grandfather the life-long butcher and free-lance sausage maker. This was about the same time her neo-hippie grandson was also forgoing animal flesh. In deference to the generation gap of the times, we had something to talk about. However, she still didn’t throw away the glaciated meat in the freezer.
Grandma died at age 83. Her kitchen didn’t always smell of warm bread and there wasn’t a quilt always under construction in the corner. She did always have Sara Lee coffee cake on hand, and she did let me watch whatever game show I wanted when I visited.
The Waltons only existed on TV and in our imaginations, and sometimes it is hard to remember that. None of us really had grandparents like that. And really – what stories would we have to tell if we did.