When my mom parked her coupe in my driveway that morning, she asked if should she take her raincoat and umbrella. “It’s not going to rain,” I said dismissively. Los Angeles has a rainy season, November to March, and it was late May. Maybe some early June gloom, but rarely rain, not even a drizzle…
-aside-
Of [...]
Well, it was nothing like an army barracks.
I don’t know why it’s taken me over two months to write this entry, but I think it has to do with my ambivalence with blogs in general, which (I hope) will be the topic of a future post.
Lucille’s last home was a place called The Village. She [...]
Lucille died of pneumonia last week. After my mom’s father died, she moved to Hemet, California, to be near her sister and her friend Virginia, but her sister died almost 15 years ago, and Virginia moved to Florida a few years after that.
Lucille was cremated, and her ashes were sent to somewhere in Orange County. “Why Orange County?” I asked my mom.
“I don’t know why Orange County,” my mom said. She repeated the last three words as I did.
“What does it matter?” I heard my dad say in the background.*
Grandma Sue just turned 98 on April 7th (although her birth certificate says she was born on May 2, 1910, and she says she was born during Passover that year, which only ran until May 1, 1910, so this is the subject of a whole ‘nother story), and she still plays bridge, listens to the Metropolitan Opera every Saturday morning during the season, reads The New Yorker weekly, and tries to walk 500 steps a day.
At her birthday party Saturday night (incidentally, my grandfather Aaron, her husband, would have turned 100 years old that night, along with Bette Davis), she attributed her longevity to walking and to not eating potato chips because they’re junk. The attendees went briefly silent, realizing that their lust for the fried potato would be the death of them, but anyway…
Grandma can certainly be repetitive (the usual: Have you been eating? Do you have any friends? Are you putting money into the bank?), but in the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that she repeats certain anecdotes to me with regularity.