Love,
Me
Dear Me,
I really wish you had been there to see Mom’s face when we spotted Gram in the baggage-claim area when we landed in Florida.
(Oh, that’s right, technically you were there.)
Anyway, Gram was easy to spot, that was for sure—a baggy, bright, orange-juice-colored T-shirt with the words, “Sunshine Sisters” printed on it and sparkly silver and gold flip-flops with foofy, plastic flowers on them.
This was not at all the way Gram looked when she used to greet us in the doorway of her old house as she made sure we took off our shoes outside the door so as not to dirty up her beloved white carpeting.
Gram told us we were “a sight for sore eyes,” and enveloped Mom and me (at the same time) in a huge hug, squeezing us both so tight I felt like she was trying to deflate us. When she finally let go, Mom and I both told Gram how glad we were to see her.
(Her hug really did make me glad to see her.)
“So, ‘Sunshine Sisters,’ Mother? Who are they?” Mom said stepping back from Gram and looking at her shirt.
Mom asked the question so casually that anyone who didn’t know her would never realize there were many more questions hammering around in her head, like “Why aren’t you wearing a sensible pair of sandals instead of those gaudy flip-flops?” or “What made you think it was a good idea to go out in public dressed in a sloppy T-shirt instead of something more prudent, like a nice polo or pullover?”
And even though those questions on the surface sound kind of snarky, in Mom’s defense, which are three words you might be surprised to hear me say, Mom really can’t help asking questions like that in situations like this. Mom thinks presentation is everything. It’s just how she is. So, seeing Gram dressed in such an ill-mannered way probably raised all the hairs on the back of her neck and made her feel like she was possibly going to break out in hives.
Gram held my hand as the three of us walked toward the luggage carousal, and she explained, with a grin that was bigger than the hug she’d given us, that the “Sunshine Sisters” was the nickname the pickleball group had given her and her partner.
Gram went on to tell us that pickleball was a ball-and-paddle sport (which I already knew from gym class), but what I didn’t know was that my grandma was now playing this sport with enough frequency to actually have a partner.
The look on Mom’s face told me that her next question wasn’t going to be about flip-flops, polo shirts, or pullovers. And I was correct in my assumption, because what Mom said next was, “Pickleball?!”
To which Gram answered, “I know. Weird to think I’m playing any kind of sport, isn’t it? But it’s a real hoot!”
And all I could think was that the weirdness of Gram playing pickleball was one thing, but Gram uttering a sentence with the word “hoot” in it was way past weird. It was about as absurd as me being voted best all-around athlete or first-chair musician in my middle school. And even though, most of the time, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what Mom is thinking and what she’s likely to say next, this moment was so out of the ordinary, I had no idea.
But if you think that’s mind-boggling, wait until you hear what happened when we left the terminal.
Gram led us outside to the parking lot and stopped behind a red Mustang convertible.
“Mother, what are you doing?” Mom asked sounding like the effects of our early morning flight coupled with the unexpectedness we were experiencing with Gram so far was causing her to get a little irritated.
But when Gram clicked her key fob and the trunk of the Mustang opened, Mom’s irritation morphed into what I would call slightly confused shock.
And both Mom and I said together, at exactly the same time, like it was a rehearsed line of dialogue from a play, “You’re driving a Mustang convertible?!”
“Don’t you just love it?” Gram asked giggling.
Well, I don’t have to tell you that Mom didn’t giggle.
Flip-flops and T-shirts were one thing, but a convertible Mustang that Mom didn’t know about was in a whole different league.
But I didn’t giggle either.
I laughed my head off.
This was awesome! I had a grandma who was driving a Mustang convertible!
“What happened to the Impala?” Mom asked.
“That old thing? I traded it in,” Gram said. “I didn’t mention it because you would’ve told me I was nuttier than a box of Cracker Jack buying a convertible at my age.”
Mom wouldn’t have said it like that, but whatever she did say, and whatever she was thinking at the moment, meant the exact same thing.
Gram finished by saying, “But I don’t care, because I love it!”
Gram driving around in a Mustang with the top down hardly proved that she needed rescuing. If you ask me, it proved the exact opposite.
It also maybe proved something else that made me really glad. Maybe the Mustang proved that Gram wasn’t quite as sad about Grandpa as she’d been the last time we’d seen her.
“A red convertible was actually the first thing on my WBL,” Gram said as we got into the car.
“WBL?” I asked. “What’s a WBL?”
“Yes, Mother,” Mom said. “What, pray tell, is a WBL?”
“A widow’s bucket list,” Gram said matter-of-factly.
“A widow’s bucket list?!” Mom and I said in unison again.
“You’ve heard of a bucket list—a list of things people want to do before they die.”
“Yes, Mother, I know what a bucket list is.”
“Well, since your father died, God rest his soul, my list is a widow’s bucket list.”
“Is there something besides the Mustang you’re not telling me?” Mom asked.
“Just that the Mustang is only the beginning.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mom said sounding concerned.
“You’ll see,” Gram said in a singsongy voice.
Mom took a deep breath and sighed loudly, but I laughed again as Gram turned and winked at me in the back seat.
Then Gram reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a leopard-print scarf.
What happened next is an example of the challenge involved in hanging out with old people. They do really wacky things, sometimes without even realizing how utterly inappropriate they are.
Gram folded the scarf in half diagonally, put it on her head, and tied it snugly under her chin.
(If you want to know the truth, she looked like a cleaning woman who had just stolen a sports car.)
Maybe you’ve forgotten by now that Gram was always paranoid about messing up her hair. I guess she wasn’t going to take any chances that any of her straw-like strands of hairspray-coated hair would fly in the wind as we drove with the top down.
But the wackiness didn’t stop with the scarf.
Next, she reached into her purse and pulled out a pair of sunglasses.
She told us she was lucky to get such a good deal on her new prescription driving sunglasses.
“They’re just perfect for the Florida sunshine,” she said sounding proud.
She took off her regular glasses and let them hang from a chain around her neck.
The prescription driving glasses she put on wrapped all the way around the side of her head. Now she looked like a picture from a chapter in my sixth-grade social studies book—“Women Welders Help the War Effort.”
The amusement of watching Mom get exasperated with Gram trickled away like the sweat that dripped down the back of my legs as I squirmed on the hot leather seats of Gram’s Mustang. The “coolness” of riding around in a convertible was just not enough to erase the embarrassment of Gram driving that convertible while wearing a leopard-print babushka and welder-war-effort sunglasses.
You’re probably wondering what in the world ha
ppens next. And believe me, as Gram ran over three curbs driving the Mustang out of the parking lot, I was wondering the exact same thing.
Love,
Me
Dear Me,
So, because I don’t know exactly how old you are or how much you remember about your past, there are a few things I think you need to know so that none of the angst of all that I’m going through gets lost.
Neither one of us wants that.
I don’t know if you remember Mrs. Brackman, my sixth-grade language arts teacher, but she was this huge proponent of vocabulary cultivation/acquisition, as she called it.
(You probably guessed that proponent was one of our vocabulary words. You may also have noticed that I’ve already sprinkled quite a few of her words into my letters. Thanks for noticing!)
Anyway, Mrs. Brackman loved to say, “Remember, people, words not only allow us to communicate, but they also define us.”
(You may still remember this quote word for word because she said it about five thousand times in nine months.)
We literally learned hundreds of vocabulary words throughout the year, and she quizzed us on them incessantly.
(And yes, you guessed it, “incessantly” is another vocab word. I promise not to incessantly point them out anymore. I’ll just let you find them on your own.)
Well, I found that every time I slipped a vocab word into a conversation with Mom, she usually commented on how I was being overly dramatic again, which made me want to string together entire sentences of vocabulary words every single time I spoke to her. (Who knows? Maybe you still do that just to bug her.)
I’d say things like, “Due to Mrs. Brackman’s propensity to relentlessly delve into the variety of ways words can be utilized, I have spent the school day being irked immensely and am therefore utterly exasperated and incapable of cleaning my room.”
Man, did Mom ever hate when I said things like that!
It never got me out of any work around the house or impress upon Mom the agony of the personal academic plight I faced daily at school, but all that extra vocabulary practice made me a vocab expert. So, I only missed two words all year.
(I try not to use vocab words when I talk to classmates and friends, because even though everyone knows adults might be impressed with big, long, stuffy words, kids are definitely not.)
Anyway, the day after our final vocabulary quiz, Mrs. Brackman made a colossal deal out of my overall vocabulary score, which was extraordinarily better than anyone else’s. She said she wished there was a special award she could give me for having the top vocabulary score, but then she said my reward was how well prepared I would be in life to, you guessed it, “communicate and define myself with words.” And that after all, was much more valuable than any award she could give.
Doesn’t that sound amazing?
You and I both know that the answer to that question is a monumental “NO!” There’s nothing amazing about not being good at any of the things that really count and being exceptionally good at something that no one except a vocabulary virtuoso like Mrs. Brackman is ever going to notice.
So, you might kind of cringe when I remind you that I created in my mind the Sixth-Grade Vocabulary Victor Award. I wrote about it in my journal, but then, when I reread the journal entry a week later, I realized how much of an SAP-o-saurus I was for making up an award for myself, and I ended up feeling worse than pathetic.
Love,
Me
P.S. Just so you know, SAP-o-saurus is an example of what Mrs. Brackman would call a “horrific slang term,” which makes it nearly impossible, according to Mrs. Brackman, for people to communicate with one another with any degree of accuracy. But I think, when used correctly, as I have done here, that “SAP-o-saurus” allows me to communicate something for which there is no other word.
Dear Me,
One thing I was actually looking forward to about going to Florida was lying at the condo pool chilling out.
That’s what summer’s for, right?
But my very first visit to the pool proved to be more than a little disturbing.
As soon as I chose a lounge chair and sat down, I noticed a lady sitting across the pool from me wearing some old-fashioned thing that I think was supposed to be a swimsuit, but honestly, I don’t know what it was. If it was a swimsuit, I should’ve called the police, and I’m not talking about the fashion police, I’m talking about the real police, because she obviously had stolen this historic swimsuit from some museum’s antiquated clothing exhibit. And the hat she wore was as big as a satellite dish. I bet she could’ve picked up at least a thousand TV channels with that thing.
Another lady in the pool wore a swim cap decorated with different-colored rubber flowers on top of it and with a chin strap to hold it on her head. She bobbed up and down and jumped around in the water. I think she thought she was exercising, but she looked like a drowning ladybug. She flailed her arms and legs so wildly I was afraid if I got into the water, she might pull me to the bottom of the pool and drown me.
And as if that wasn’t enough to dash my dreams of relaxing in the Florida sunshine, sitting down by the deep end was a guy who looked like he had to be a least a hundred years old. He wore huge headphones with an antenna sticking out of one side, and he sang opera songs at the top of his lungs in Italian.
The new earbuds I bought for the trip could never mute Opera Man’s loud, off-key singing voice, so I left the pool before it was even time to put on more sunscreen.
Back upstairs, Mom sat at Gram’s dining room table typing a mile a minute on her laptop with her Make It, Take It stuff strewn all over the place.
(So much for our trip to Florida being a magical time of mother-and-daughter memory-making and bonding.)
Before I go further with what happened next, I should tell you that, even though the condo pool had turned into a mega letdown so soon after arriving at Sunny Sandy Shores, the condition of Gram’s condo was a mammoth relief. I was delighted that, when Mom and I walked in, we found that the condo did not resemble Gram’s old house one bit.
Gram gave us a tour of her place while still wearing her silver and gold flip-flops, which was alarming, due to the fact that I had never seen her wear outside shoes inside the house ever before. While we walked from room to room, Gram bragged about the easy-to-keep-clean, multicolored beige carpeting that didn’t show lint, dirt, or spills of any kind.
She told us she loved her new, cute, comfortable, white wicker furniture, which she’d gotten on clearance at the Why Not Wicker store her new condo friends had told her about. And then she pointed out the expertly placed seashells on the end tables and coffee table, which she told us were “welcome gifts” from all the people who lived on the floor of her condo building, and “Wasn’t that a nice way to be welcomed to Sunny Sandy Shores?”
Near each one of the “welcome” seashells, there was a different framed family photo, and, from what we could see, those photos were the only things left from Gram’s old house.
Mom wanted to know what happened to all of Gram’s stuff.
“I wanted a fresh start… So, once the house sold, a friend of mine told me about Junk to Gems Estate Sales. They came in and took care of everything for me.”
“Why in the world would you do that?” Mom asked.
“Why wouldn’t I?” Gram said. “I asked you if you wanted anything from the house, and you didn’t…”
“Yes, but I didn’t know you were getting rid of it all,” Mom said.
“Well, it was my decision, and I decided to take the memories and sell the stuff,” Gram said sounding proud of herself. “Besides, it was nice to have some extra money to buy new things for the condo.”
Mom’s frustrated sigh said it all, but there was really no logical argument against what Gram had decided to do, especially from Mom.
After all, her career was based
on helping people preserve memories, and it sounded like Gram had the right idea.
I didn’t really care about Gram’s stuff one way or another, but the revelation that her condo wasn’t anything like her old house was a huge relief, especially now that the condo pool had turned out to be a place where way-out old-timers sat around being eccentric. I was probably going to find myself spending a lot more time inside Gram’s condo. I was grateful that I wouldn’t have to tiptoe around on white carpeting in socks or worry about the possibility of coughing or sneezing too hard and smashing to smithereens some expensive chunk of china.
When I sat down at the dining room table across from Mom to tell her about all the horrors I’d seen on my first trip to the Sunny Sandy Shores pool, I whispered because I didn’t want Gram to hear me describing her eccentric neighbors, who, for all I knew, were part of the seashell-delivering welcome wagon Gram was so fond of.
Mom stopped typing, ignored my detailed pool report, and told me that Gram had gone somewhere while I was gone.
“She was all secretive about where she was going and said it was all part of some big surprise,” Mom added sounding sort of miffed.
Then Mom’s phone rang, and you probably guessed it. It was work.
And the second Mom said “Hello,” her voice changed from a slightly annoyed tone to an enthusiastic, optimistic, cheerful one.
At the same time, there was a knock at the door. Mom motioned for me to go answer it, and when I did, I found a little old lady standing in the hallway outside Gram’s door.
She smiled at me and said, “Look at you, honey!”
This lady had such skinny arms and legs sticking out of her brightly colored, floral dress that she looked more like a marionette who had fallen into a flower bed than an actual person.
The flower-bed-puppet lady reached out and squeezed my arm with her skinny, twig-like fingers and said, “You’re even more precious than your grandmother said you were.”
When I Hit the Road Page 2