Like every family, we have many stories about our older members of our family. Many may not appreciate the antics of the old ones and may view them as a nuisance. My recommendation is to love everything your older relatives do and see the humor in it. Don’t ever forget all the work they put in to help you become the well balanced adult that you are. If you are not well balanced, don’t blame them, they tried. On day, you too will be causing mayhem in your family.
Grandma Mabel, my father’s mother, used to smoke so she had the typical pinched “smoker’s” face and was as “thin as a rail” as she would say. She was full of strange little sayings such as “I have to go see a man about a kitten” whenever she needed to go to the restroom. All my life I remember her talking about “taking care of Suziebell” and I thought she had a secret friend she would commune with on occasion until her last few years I learned that “Suziebell” was her secret word for the feminine hygiene department.
I recently saw some pictures of Grandma Mabel when she was young and my father was still a baby. In the picture she was “thin as a rail” and she looked pretty much as she looked in her latter years, pinched face and all.
From the stories she would tell she was a fiery tempered red head. Her husband, Gerald, was described by her as a very abusive individual who consorted with the criminal element of the times. He was a cook and the gangster Dutch Shultz and his gang would hang out at my grandparent’s home and eat there.
One time Grandma Mabel, then around 19 or 20 years old, was carving up a chicken in the kitchen while the mobsters were hanging out in the dining room. Cooling on the open kitchen window sill was a pie she had just taken out of the oven. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a pair of hands reaching up to the window sill from the outside to steal the pie. It was one of the gangsters and grandma’s response was to take the meat fork in her hand and pin the thief’s hand to the sill with it. The resulting screams and cursing proved very entertaining to the other gangsters and their opinion of grandma went way up. I, myself, have always made it a point never to try to take anything from grandma when she had any sharp instruments in her hands.
Fast forward 50 years.
The sight that would strike fear into all members of my family was that of an approaching Ford or Mercury with a tiny set of eyes peering between the steering wheel and the dash as Grandma and Uncle Johnny came to visit.
My grandma Mable regained contact with her long lost brother John in 1960 and they lived together in a sort of love but mostly hate relationship.
They both had the last name of Foster, as grandma had taken back her maiden name after her husband left her, so most people thought they were married. They might as well have been as they sure acted like it. They lived up to the old saying “marriage is a fine institution, that is, if you like institutions”.
Johnny was a sweet old man who loved his great nephews because he could take us bowling or to the park for an outing just to get away from grandma.
He was a very quiet man who spoke so rapidly one could hardly understand a word he said. I remember the week before my wedding he decided that as the oldest male in our family it was his duty to explain the birds and the bees to me and the proper care of my soon to be wife. I nodded gravely while offering an occasional “right” or “OK” as he rapidly, and mostly unintelligibly, spoke of the wonderful world of sex and marriage.
Uncle Johnny would always be with grandma and she took it upon herself to loudly comment on every move he made.
“Hurry up John! Watch your step John! Careful John!”
During this commentary Johnny would quietly get out of the car and slowly follow her to the door. You could hear them long before the inevitable knock on the door followed by the customary peek in the window to see if you were hiding from her.
When I still lived at home with my parents they would occasionally finance a movie for me to get me out of the house so they could have some “private time”. It was during one of these evenings that grandma and John stopped by for a visit. As my folks later related to me, they heard her long before the dreaded knock on the door. They had the lights turned down in the home to provide ambiance for this “special” evening so they just stayed still hoping she would figure that no one was home. After several knocks they heard grandma coming around to the other side of the home to peek in the windows.
They thought they had succeeded in their little deception until they heard a crash coming from the kitchen. Dad ran into the kitchen to find grandma pushing a protesting Uncle Johnny through the open window as she was certain some nefarious activity was going on and she had to save the day. My very angry and equally naked father informed them that all was well and rather bluntly requested them to leave the premises. Grandma was of course insulted at the lack of appreciation for her efforts to save them and left in a huff while a slightly smiling and very amused Uncle Johnny followed faithfully along.
Grandma Mabel has a nose that most bloodhounds would envy. She could smell a mosquito fart in a hurricane. Just open the refrigerator while she was around and she would start listing off all the things that had “gone bad” and then start throwing them out without waiting for your permission.
When I lived on my own with my roommate, Rod, he and I would live off grandma’s discarded food. We would always offer to take it home “for the dogs” after a visit and then eat like kings for a week until we went over for the next “scrap run”.
She invented the term “musty” and used it for everything that she couldn’t positively identify. She and John lived for a while out by Twenty Nine Palms in southern California until John’s death in 1983. She would repeatedly call out the local gas provider to complain about a hazardous gas leak under her home. Each time they would patiently come out and explain that the nearest natural gas line was five miles away. Of course, this would never satisfy grandma as she was certain that her nose always knew best. To her credit, they never were involved in a tragic natural gas explosion.