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No one must know my terrible secret...

House of Noh!

Friday, December 09, 2005

My Grandma’s got a special bag for casseroles. It’s made of nylon. It’s insulated. It’s got two straps that, held together, form a balanced carrying handle. My Grandma can bake a casserole, zip the pyrex up in her special casserole carrier, grab her aluminum hospital cane and tie her crinkled clear plastic head scarf on her head and go out and bust through some snow drifts and then drive 50 miles. Then when she unzips that mutha at Aunt Henny’s house the tuna noodles are still hot as fuck and everybody even Uncle Earl is totally blown away and shits their pants. And by 50 miles, I don’t mean 50 miles in 2005. I mean 50 miles in 1938: My Grandma doesn’t drive anything more than a two-lane road. And she sure as fuck isn’t about to ever start making left turns.

My grandma told me about her new bad eye this Thanksgiving.

I sort of expected her to get all angry and defiant and stab herself in her new bad eye with a corn cob holder, just for shits, because she’s a bad-assed old bitch who speaks her mind about drunks and democrats. She’s had to be that bad-assed, at least as far back as she when she buried her first husband who would get drunk and pee all over her back under the blankets at night and she spent two years living in a house the two of them couldn’t afford coal for during the winter while he died of gout at 28 and he wailed and shouted day and night for her to stab a steak knife in his swelled feet they hurt so bad.

But my Grandma doesn’t get all angry and defiant about her new bad eye. And I’m a little shocked that she’s just kind of sad when she tells me about it. I guess that there’s this big black spot in her middle of vision for one of her eyes. She says that she can do her puzzles, but not as well as she used to. And the doctor won’t let her drive (and this is in part because everything was going fine at her last doctor’s appointment but then my mom had to open her big mouth and tell the Doctor how old my Grandma was and the doctor said she shouldn’t drive anymore.) The worst part about her eye, my Grandma says, is that she says it might happen to her at any time, in the other eye, and then she’ll be blind. I guess it just sort of happens all of a sudden and there’s no warning, and it might not happen for the next ten years or it could happen in the next half an hour.

Here’s another thing about my Grandma: She’s got a pie carrier. It’s made out of nylon, and has two handles. It looks sort of like an abbreviated insulated pizza bag. Except it’s for grandmas. And pies. It holds two of them (pies), each in a pie-shaped Tupperware. Both barrels of her pie carrier loaded with homemade crusts and hand-syruped fruit fillings, she’ll clip plastic green earrings to her ears and walk across grass in high heels and over a rough-hewn timber bridge above a creek at a roadside rest stop in Paw Paw Michigan and pull two totally undamaged, halo-crusted, still-warm magnificences out of her pie carrier and the entire congregation at the church picnic even her little hobbit-shaped minister will be totally blown away and shit their pants.

It must have been over twenty years ago that I think my Grandma started noticing that when she loaded her pie carrier with a fruit and a gourd, I always picked the pumpkin pie. Ever since, when the pies start going around the table my Grandma shouts, “pass the pumpkin to Brian! He likes the pumpkin!”

And sometimes when she’d get a chance she would (already knowing the answer) ask me what kinds of pies she should bring to the next holiday gathering and I’d thrust my fist in the air and shout, “Pumpkin! Thundercats ho!” Then I’d run off and hit my head on a table and she’d show up that next holiday gathering with a pumpkin pie in her pie carrier and make sure it got to me early in the passing. I was just thinking, is all, and I think this Grandma’s pie thing is my new version of self-respect that I need to be faithful to.