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Why My Grandma is the Most Grandma of Them All

I did this for my dad and for my mom, I can’t believe it took me this long to write about my favorite sassy old lady. Here it goes, why my grandma (Gram) is the most grandma of them all:

1. Although she benefits from the wisdom of old age, she doesn’t scoff at those who are younger than her.

When I was a kid, if I came home from school crying about something, my Gram’s first reaction was always to pat me on the back and say, “This too shall pass.”

At the time that saying did nothing but frustrate me. This too shall pass??? Gram, you clearly have no idea what I’m going through, here. I’m in turmoil! YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO PITY ME!

When I got older, I realized that she had lived through the Great Depression, raised five boys alone after her husband died, and was on the verge of going hungry for most of her life. She probably couldn’t give a fuck about the fact that I got hit in the head with a volleyball in gym class. During the Great Depression they were lucky to HAVE heads. And no one could afford volleyballs. Saying, “This too shall pass,” was giving me too much credit AS IS. She could have just smacked me and said, “BE HAPPY YOU HAVE A HEAD TO HIT.”

When I’m a grandma, and my grandkids are crying because their cyborgs aren’t making an organic, free range lunch fast enough, I hope I have the grace to say, “This too shall pass,” and hug those ungrateful little assholes.

2. She’s the smallest woman alive.

Here’s a list of things my grandma can fit in: a laundry basket, a backpack, a gopher hole, a cereal box…I bet she could even fit in Donald Trump’s minuscule, charred chestnut of a heart. It’s impossible not to love my tiny grandma.

3. She is really funny and she knows it.

Over Thanksgiving we brought Gram to my parents house to eat dinner with us. She can’t walk without a cane, so I helped her to the table and set her cane next to the chair. She looked up at me and said, “You know, at home I have a fancy three wheeled cart that I use to get around.”

“That sounds nice,” I said.

“Yeah,” she replied. “…I was gonna bring it today, but I didn’t want to show off.”

Later that evening, after a full meal, she fell asleep on the couch. We were all sitting around her, talking and snacking, when she woke up suddenly and shouted, “I’m still alive!”

4. Nearly every day of her life, she has finished the newspaper’s crossword puzzle in pen.

This is old person, level: bad ass. I still can’t do crosswords in pen, and I have a Bachelor’s degree in English. When I would stare at her in awe as she worked, she’d say, “Ehh, you get two or three and then the rest fall into place.”

WTF? No, gram. That has never happened to me.

She’s smarter than me and I don’t even know if she finished high school. She might have had to drop out to work in a mine or in one of those child factories. (I mean a factory that employs children, not one that makes children. …See? I can’t even form a proper sentence. Like I’m going to know a five letter word for, “Poi parties.”)

((I googled it–it’s “Hawaii.” GOOGLE HAS RUINED CROSSWORDING. I WILL BE DUMB FOREVER.))

Moving on.

5. She will make ravioli for you.

Over her lifetime, my grandma has had many of her children and grandchildren live with her for various reasons, and when asked what the best part of their time with her was, they all have the same response: the late night food. My dad said that when he and my mom would come home at 2:00 am after a long night of partying, Gram would wake up, ask if they were hungry, and immediately commence frying two huge steaks before they answered.

Her masterpiece, though, is veal ravioli. The dough is paper thin, and gently stuffed with the perfect amount of meat ground with spices. Each bite is a little, pillowy, angel butt shaking in tomato sauce. (Wow. I managed to make ravioli from my Gram both blasphemous and sexual…I think I need help.) Anyway, they are not easy to make. When I attempted them, I was left with a pile of gummy meat turds. But Gram seems to make them the way Rosie the robot on the Jetsons pulls fully frosted cakes out of her tits. She will make them on command for anyone who asks.

The best example of this comes from my cousin, Lee. She lived with my grandma while she was a senior in high school. It was the 80s, and most of her friends were hard core punk rockers with mohawks, chains, and piercings. They had grown used to not being accepted by parents, so when they came to pick up Lee for a night out, they waited down on the corner by the streetlight where they wouldn’t be seen and judged. They stood there, quietly smoking, but no one gets past Gram. From her kitchen window she noticed them out there, and leaned her little body out yelling, “Come in! Come in!”

Ten minutes later, when Lee came downstairs dressed and ready to go, she was shocked to see her friends sitting at the kitchen table in all their punk glory, politely waiting for their ravioli to be sauced.

6. On that note: She could be the #1 reason why I was a fat kid.

My house, with its six family members, was a Lord of the Flies situation for snacks. If you got to them first, you’d better hoard them because you may never see them again. My mom once found an entire box of chicken legs under my brother’s bed in various stages of being eaten.

Gram’s house, however, was a snack Mecca. She always had jars full of candy on the counter. Sure, a lot of it was the weird old people stuff that isn’t even good enough to waste your teeth on, like those tiny wrapped strawberry hard candies that must come free with senior citizenship…but there was some good stuff, too. Reese’s. Snickers. Milky Ways. And Gram always bought the good cheesy puffs: the Cheetos in a can. (Yeah, they came in a can back then. And they were fresh as FUCK.) She also had a large assortment of shelled nuts in a wider selection than I have ever seen at any grocery store to this day. We lived in a small coal mining town in Pennsylvania. Where was she getting an endless supply of Brazil nuts? And what the hell IS a Brazil nut? I was always too elbow deep in Cheetos to find out.

If I were staying home sick from school, Gram never failed to bring me my favorite fat kid treat: thick ricotta cookies from the local deli. Since I was usually home “sick” because I didn’t study for a test or I wanted to watch a rock block of Saved by the Bell, I ate them with gusto. By the time my mom checked on me I actually WAS ill, not from the flu, but from eating a baker’s dozen of Italian cookies.

“Gram says I need them to grow,” I’d garble, my face full of crumbs.

7. Her grandkids are always right.

Especially when it comes to having fun. This story is courtesy of my brother. He told me that every year after the Fourth of July, Gram would smuggle away some of the fireworks from each of the family parties, and keep them in her house in a cupboard. She did this so that her grandsons, “would have something to play with throughout the year.” …Just like whole milk and peanut butter sandwiches, there is nothing a growing boy needs more than recreational explosives. My brother and my cousin, probably about ages 12 and 13 then, frequented “the fireworks cupboard,” and routinely set off black market aerial fireworks in the back yard after school. These were the same fireworks that their dads had lit on the Fourth of July, instructing them to stay far away from at all times.

One day, they got too close to a tree and singed it, causing someone to call the fire department.

The fire chief himself showed up on my grandma’s front porch.

“Ma’am,” he said, “Are you aware that there are kids in your yard lighting fireworks and nearly setting fires?”

“Did they set a fire?” asked my grandma, her arms folded over her apron.

“…Well, no, but….”

“Then leave those boys alone! They’re good boys. Don’t you have something better to do than pick on little kids?? You shoo, now! Shoo!”

My gram shooed the fire chief.

Even more amazingly, he listened.

8. She has weird lessons.

Gram once told me that if you’ve got something stuck in your throat and you can’t get it to go down, swallow a piece of bread and it will push it down for you. I’ve used this advice like a million times over the years.

It makes me slightly depressed that at some point she must have looked at me and thought, “There’s a chance this girl will die on food.”

But…honestly…she was right.

9. She’s going senile in the best way.

This year Gram is turning 92. She is definitely not as sharp as she used to be, but she’s going out like James Dean. …Like James Dean if he actually lived a full life and got really old and did hilarious shit. For example, she has stopped giving a fuck what comes out of her mouth. One time, she was visiting our house and my dad kept calling for my mom (as he often does), shouting, “Deb! Deb! Deb!”

Exasperated my grandma shouted back, “DID I REALLY BIRTH YOU? YOU ARE ANNOYING.”

Most times her senility is adorable. When she first my husband (then my boyfriend), she hugged him from behind– then, second guessing herself, she leaned forward to look in his face.

“Are you one of mine?” she asked.

He smiled back at her and said, “No.”

She shrugged and hugged him again, “Meh, now you are.”

Other times, her senility is just awesome. We only give her a thimble of wine to make toasts on holidays, but she always forgets if we’ve done the toast and refills her glass 700 times. What does she care? Someone has to drive her home anyway. She lost her license when she Thelma and Louise-ed her car over the hill at the CVS.

When she lost her prescription glasses, instead of going to the eye doctor she went to the Dollar Store, bought some sunglasses, and just started to wear those—even in the house, as if they were her real glasses. So not only did she not have her prescription, but she also made her vision twice as dark. She was walking into literally everything. When she nearly fell over the footstool for the tenth time my mom finally said, “Gram, you have to take those sunglasses off. Those are not your real glasses.”

“What? THESE?” she shouted, pointing at them. “BUT THESE ARE COOL.”

10. She never minded having me around.

With five kids, eleven grandkids, and six great-grandkids, you’d think my grandma would be tired of all of us. But I never remember not being welcome around her. Growing up I spent endless afternoons at her house, typing out nonsensical manuscripts on her old typewriter, watching Golden Girls, and pretending to rob her with her suntan pantyhose stretched over my face (she always let me keep the five dollars I “stole”). I ate all her snacks. I left chocolate fingerprints on her Encyclopedia Britannica. There’s no way I wasn’t annoying, but she never asked me to go home. Instead, I was always greeted with the song she sang every time I walked in a room, “Here she comes, Miss America!” I was a swarthy thirteen-year-old in a “Save the Seals” t-shirt and a too-tight skort, but still, always, “Here she comes, Miss America!”

If you have an awesome grandma, there’s no need for a tiara– you have already won the greatest prize in the world. :) So, I raise a tiny thimble of wine to Gram today–cheers!!

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