Anybody else have a grandma who wore cowboy boots?
My Grandma Gladys wore cowboy boots with
bright red polyester pantsuits.
She wore thick black mascara, gaudy jewelry,
And dyed her hair coal black till the day she died.
She smoked like a chimney,
cussed like a sailor,
and told wonderful tall tales.
Once, when I was a little girl, I said
Grandma, you exaggerate.
She said, Elisa I don’t exaggerate, I just lie.
Both perfectly illustrating my point,
And showing herself to be a marvelous role model for little girls.
Pantsuits, nail polish and jewelry were not the only things
Grandma preferred in red.
She had thick red shag carpet throughout her house
and almost every year she would re-paint
the outside of her house in some combination of red and black
or red and white, as long as there was red.
In fact, she would have painted the whole town red
if she could have— and she nearly did.
One day she decided that all the dumpsters
in her town of 278 people should also be red.
She managed to convince most of the town
to paint their own dumpsters.
But there was one lady, this diehard holdout
who simply refused to have her dumpster painted.
And so my grandmother snuck over to her house
In the middle of the night and painted it anyway!
She was always doing crazy things like that
to make people laugh all over town.
Like many of my family members,
Grandma was a bit crusty on the outside,
but a big marshmallow on the inside.
So you might imagine her ambivalence in
Raising a child who was going blind.
She seemed to hold my mother to the same standard
As her sighted children
Sometimes she would get so frustrated she would say,
If you would just open your damned eyes, you could see!
<pause>
This might seem a little brutal,
But keep in mind, we’re talking about a family in Kansas
Who survived the Great Dust Bowl.
And who, unlike their wussier neighbors,
Did not migrate out to California when times got tough,
but stubbornly stayed on their land.
And do you know what they ate to survive?
Boiled racoon and fried squirrel!
But by God they kept their land!
And it was exactly this tenacity of spirit and tough love
That made my mom into the incredibly
independent blind woman that she is.
<pause>
On the other hand,
Every time they went to the eye doctor
And he told Grandma that her little girl
would be completely blind by the time she was thirty,
Grandma would cry and cry and cry.
<pause>
And then she would let my mom
eat an entire box of pastries on the ride home.
You could also see Grandma’s softer side
In her love for animals.
She had her own business grooming and breeding little dogs,
mostly Chihuahuas, Pomeranians, and Malteses.
She would paint their little toenails bright red
brush perfumed powder into their fur so they wouldn’t smell,
and then add a little bow even if they were boys.
She also kept birds and lots of fish.
And she even had a great big iguana for years.
As for the fish, they were usually very well taken care of
and she would get up in the middle of the night
to add water to their tank.
She also happened to love
to bleach everything that got in her way
(she was so famous for that bleaching
that everyone thought it very fitting
that when she died
she actually died right in front of the wash machine
with a jug of bleach in her hand.)
So of course one night,
she accidentally grabbed the bleach
instead of the water and to her horror,
all the poor little fish turned white and floated to the top.
As for her birds, several of them were talkers.
My grandpa’s name was Roy and
One of them liked to say, Roy is a dummy, Roy is a dummy.
Another one liked to say, Let me out dammit, let me out!
So grandma had a slightly twisted sense of humor.
In addition to raising perfumed dogs,
and teaching birds to deliver insults and obscenities,
Grandma was a successful Avon lady for years.
She used to bring me little demi stick perfumes
and perfume in cute little animal shaped bottles.
So I was not surprised when, one April,
for my sixth birthday, she handed me a little Avon bag.
Now you need to know that only 18 months earlier
my 3-year-old brother who could have passed for my twin
was killed in an accident,
so it was just me and Eric
and our parents left,
And the whole family was still choking from grief,
and now my mother was pregnant with my little sister.
So it was against this backdrop
that I was handed the little Avon bag.
<pause>
And when she put it in my hands,
to my very great surprise,
<pause> it moved!!
When I opened the bag
To my delight
I found the most adorable tiny
little brown peka-pom puppy
named Little Bee
who lived well into my college years.
It was many years later when I realized that was
Grandma’s very loving way of helping us with our grief.
And it was a good one.
Little Bee was a bundle of joy.
So Grandma was a good soul and in spite of her antics,
And maybe partly because of them,
She was loved far and wide.
So much so that even though her funeral was a graveside service
on an extremely cold weekday in January,
over 200 people came out from miles around to honor her.
I could tell so many stories about her other antics,
but the last story I want to share with you
is about her scandalous romance with my Grandpa. <pause>
My biological grandfather was a violent alcoholic
whom she divorced before I was born.
So the only grandpa I really knew was Grandpa Roy,
Who was . . . only one . or . two years older . . . than my mother!
That’s right, my grandma was a cougar.
<pause>
This was in the 60’s and you can imagine
it was the gossip of the town for over thirty years—
everyone was always trying to guess
exactly how many years older my grandma was.
She kept this such a secret that when she died,
my aunt found her driver’s license sewn into
a secret compartment in her purse!
Having given this a great deal of thought
She once proposed to my grandpa
That they put the year of her death on the gravestone,
but not the year of her birth.
So that’s exactly what they did.
And she took that secret with her to the grave
And went out painting the town red with frustration,
And making sure it was she who got the last laugh.
Gasping for Light 