This is the time of year when families unite for festive cheer. Relatives spread far and wide gather together to enjoy those special holiday traditions. Mistletoe is hung! Cookies are baked! Great-aunt Nattie is wheeled in from the retirement home, a box of Depends under her lap robe! Cousin Giorg is let out on the prison's day release program, an electronic ankle bracelet monitoring his whereabouts! Teenage Yolanda is having a bulimic episode in the upstairs bathroom! Yes, the gang has gathered at grandmother's house once again!
But not everyone's grandma is the pleasant little apple-cheeked gnome that Norman Rockwell would have us believe populate the United States. (And don't tell me that good old Norman didn't have a psycho family member or two tucked away in the closet with all those Saturday Evening Posts.) We can admit it, we're grown-ups: Some grandmothers are - well - different. Mine certainly was. I always think of her at this time of year, and give a special prayer of thanks that she's moved on into the next incarnation where she's possibly been re-born as someone's family pet or the weird little kid next door. No matter what form she's taken, she's no doubt freaking-out someone over the holidays.
We called my grandmother Nanny and she looked like
one of those country craft dolls with the bonnets and long pioneer
skirts, the face made from a wizened dried apple. Sort of cute and weirdly evil at the same time.
It's not surprising that Nanny was a tad twisted since she came
from the country - Austria - that gave the world both Freud and Nazis,
a combination that endowed its citizens with the ability to
psychoanalyze their own messianic tendencies. Nanny favored the Olde
Country Refugee look. She never ventured outside without a high-necked,
long-sleeved, floor-length black dress on, and old-fashioned shoes that
looked like a cobbler had just finished making them from leather he'd
tanned himself. All she needed to complete the ensemble was a
soot-filled railroad station filled with wailing babies and steamer
trunks.
Along with dressing like a character from Masterpiece Theater,
Nanny also had a pipeline to God. Whenever she visited my family, she
packed a prayer book, her Bible and not one but two rosaries: her primo
rosary, and her back-up rosary, in case of loss. Nanny did not
want to be in a house filled with sinful children and find herself
short on prayer devices. Packing anything less than two rosaries was,
in her mind, like going to the Congo and skimping on malaria pills, or
entering the DMZ with nothing but a pair of pinking shears.
In fact, if my grandmother could have figured out the plumbing
apparatus necessary to install a fine-mist sprayer of holy water
throughout the house, she would have done it in a flash. Better yet,
had those big plastic bazooka-sized squirt guns been invented when I
was a child, there's no doubt that Nanny would have loaded one up with
holy water and blasted the hell right out of us - so to speak. I can
see it now, Nanny yanking out the cork from a jug of holy water with
her teeth, balancing a bazooka spray gun in one hand and loadin' it up
with holy water with the other, while the theme from Saving Private Ryan played in the background.
Or maybe she would have gone for an adventure movie approach:
bazooka clutched to her chest, her crucifix glinting in the sun, she
would have hit-the-dirt-and-rolled into belly position and fired the
holy spirit at us until we were drenched with salvation. She would have
enjoyed being a water-pistol-packin' grandma for Christ.
Along with being one with the Lord, my grandmother was also quite a
story-teller. She enlivened many a family gathering by launching into
bizarre tales at precisely the wrong moment. You never knew when the
demented raconteur in her would appear but there was a good chance it
would come out during dinner when we were gathered around the table.
Nanny would let fly with an opening sentence, a first verbal pitch that
would guarantee either: (1) a rapidly cooling entrée as we sat,
paralyzed by the story; (2) severe loss of appetite; (3) weeping; or
(4) vomiting. She hit the jackpot one day and triggered all four
responses when she declared that, "Mmmmmmm, Lucky sure is tender!" just
as forks were midway to our mouths. We froze. We froze like the instant
after the nuclear explosion, just before you crumble into dust.
"What does she mean?" one of my sisters asked.
Nanny smiled serenely and said, "What I mean, children, is that we
should thank God for giving us such a tender calf to enjoy. And we'll
have many opportunities to thank God as we enjoy more roasts like this
one, and hamburgers, and steaks, and - "
"We're eating Lucky?" we children screamed in unison. We'd had our
calf Lucky for several months but just a week before this fateful
dinner, Lucky had been carried away in a little trailer "to go be with
other cow friends and have more fields to play in," our mother had told
us. We'd been sad - we all enjoyed petting Lucky - but none of us had
been very rigorous about feeding and watering him, and no-one
had volunteered to clean out his little stall, so Lucky had become a
somewhat disconsolate, manure-caked and thin calf. It dawned on us that
our mother, who routinely delivered the Never Tell A Lie lecture, had
not only lied to us but had forced us to become pet cannibals.
Evidently, Lucky wasn't well-named after all. We took turns crying and
sticking our fingers down our throats in the bathroom.
So this year, as I trim my Christmas tree and sing "Over the river
and through the woods, to Grandmother's house we go . . ." I'll think
of Nanny again and the holiday feasts from my childhood. And I'll take
a moment to thank her for my early-in-life decision to swear off red
meat, and be grateful that I never had a pet turkey named Lucky.
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