Grandma & Grandpa

One of my early memories of Grandma and Grandpa was of visiting them on the farm. Dad had finished working an evening shift, all of us kids were already in bed and he had Mom pack us up in the car for a ride out to Grandma and Grandpa’s farm. It was about an hour and a half ride and by the time we got there, it was very late indeed. In fact Grandma and Grandpa had long since gone to bed.

Arriving after midnight, Grandma was patient and hardworking, helping to get all the kids settled in places to sleep, feeding us even, if we were hungry. I don’t know how Dad got away with it. Certainly it was in large part because of Grandma’s big heart. I never remember feeling censured by her. Grandpa was completely the opposite, and I lived quite in fear of him. Grandpa never stirred that night, or certainly never got up anyway. And it was just as well, for he’d have surely been in a miserable rage, as he always seemed to be.

Saintly as she often was, Grandma sure had a lot of the devil in her. She could cuss and she could turn a ribald phrase with casual abandon. She became like a mythical figure to me, Earth Mother and Saucy Raconteur, rolled into one.

She was, if not the author, at least the source for some of my favorite quotations. Like: "Go piss up a rope" (her advice to ne’er-do-wells), "It's good, clean dirt" (advice to the prissy child), "It ain't gonna kill you" (more of the same), "You gotta die of something" (response to hypochondria), “Full of piss and vinegar” (her description of... well, anyone like herself!) and "You're gonna eat a peck of dirt before you die" (in other words, ‘Cleanliness might be next to godliness, but it's probably overrated.’ A useful one since the plumbing didn't work so well on the farm anyway.)

And if ever a line like any of those could be delivered with a twinkle in the eye, Grandma was the one to do it. That twinkle described her better than anything else I can think of. She was always ready to poke you in the ribs, give a little wink and toss off a rejoinder that, anywhere but our house, would surely raise an eyebrow.

Like the time when I was about eighteen and she offered sex-education device.

"You know what you gotta do when that thing is about to get you in trouble? Open a window, lay it on the sill and then CLOSE THAT WINDOW HARD!"

Her advice was always like that: playful, unsentimental and usually a little risque. Like the time she asked Judy, (in reference to marrying me), "So, are you getting any?" Judy already knew she'd married into a wacky family, but how can you ever be ready for a question like that from your Grandmother-In-Law?

I inherited a bit of that impishness, but I've had to learn the hard way that it's easier to be accepted for that kind of naughtiness if you're an eighty-plus-year-old woman. Like the time we were looking at houses and a realtor, showing us an attractive "rumpus" room said something like "The kind of place your daughter might like to go with her boyfriend." I thought that was terribly presumptuous and so I responded, "Or maybe she'd like to go there with her girlfriend!" Judy did not see the humor in that one.

I might have said, more succinctly, “Go piss up a rope!”

But nowadays a fella could get himself in some deep doo-doo for using Grandma’s lines.