dorth

unfortunately, my dad's mother is still very much alive. my aunt has brain cancer but she's still going strong at the age of god only knows. you might be able to divine that i'm not a fan of the woman. i will tell you why. she's a lunatic.

the thing i remember most about my childhood concerning this grandmother is this phrase, "you would be so pretty if you lost 10 pounds." she said this every single time we came into contact with one another starting at about seven years old. i'm not exaggerating. i never said anything back. when i got a dog at nineteen, she said she was fat. i jumped all over her. i let all the stored upness out. she never said that again.

i loved my granda jay. i don't know how they ended up together (see my mother and father's relationship). i assume because she might have been pretty or something back in the day. that's the only reason i can imagine.

they had two sons. my dad's brother died very young, before thirty, because of my grandmother. he had been in a car accident. his legs were broken, he was in rough shape. when he was released my grandmother thought it would be a great idea to take him out on her brother's boat on the lake. both legs in casts. grandpa jay said no. she went anyway. the boat sank and my uncle billy died.

he was cremated and stayed in the basement of two houses before he was buried about thirty years later. i really don't "believe" in a lot of "stuff." but i think that's terribly wrong.

when i was about 13 my grandmother said, "here, i think you're old enough to read this." (my grandpa was still alive and therefore billy was still in the basement.) it was an article about billy in reader's digest. he had cerebral palsy and it chronicled my grandmother organizing the local women to help in his care. nowhere did it mention my father. it was weird.

when i was 15 she accused me of stealing her jewelery. she really didn't ever climb stairs because she is fat and had lyme disease. so one day she was coming down the stairs, red in the face and puffing, and i couldn't figure out why. i stood at the bottom of the stairs looking at her. "you stole this from me!" "what?" "you were going to steal this! it was in your bag!" she was holding a large bookend made of amethyst that i always loved. it happened to have been in my bag because i had just moved my stuff from the apartment in the garage to the room upstairs in the house since my parents arrived to visit for the end of the summer. she did not buy this story.

she came down to say, "you've been stealing my jewelery!" she had not, apparently, found any jewels when she ransacked my room so she was waving the bookend at me. my sister and i had been playing with her old jewelery downstairs where she kept it, with her permission. she didn't care about that stuff she said she had moved all her "good jewelery" up to the new addition on the ground floor.

i had not taken any of it and said so. the house became a hullabaloo as she was ranting and raving about the jewelery thief. i slipped out the front door and went to hide in woods and cry. she found the "stolen jewelery" in the kitchen where my sister had put it when she was done playing with it. she didn't apologize. she said, "you know sometimes i worry about you, becky." what? you worry about me becoming a jewel thief?

she is not unwealthy. she went to an accountant with my mother after my grandpa died. the accountant said, "you know, you could easily set up all your grandchildren with accounts that when they turn a certain age they could have access to." (there's three of us). she said, "what if i need that money?" that was the end of that conversation.

we have two things in common. dogs and cooking. we like both. we get into arguments about dogs but we still like them. my mother has a great dane that i rescued from near death (she was given an overdose of xylazine by her breeder as a home euthanasia attempt). my grandmother says she's too skinny and harasses my mother and me about it all the time. "she's too skinny! she shouldn't be locked up all the time! she needs a better bed!"

she did teach me a lot about cooking. we hardly disagree about cooking, so there's that. she would sit and direct me when we visited her in montana. we made very different food than my mom did at home. we made interesting foods. it was fun. i used to call her sometimes to get a recipe from her stash. or ask her advice on something i was cooking.

in her old age, she has come to a point where she cannot do everything for herself anymore. she's always had maids and such but now she can't shouldn't drive she really can't live alone. she came here and built a house on my parent's property. (with a pool!) my mom has to help her out a lot even though she likes to treat her as a servant. the upside is maybe she'll die, chuck and i can move in and have a pool!