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Visiting With The Past
 My 84-year-old grandmother had to go into the hospital last week and in many ways, I dreaded visiting her. I hate the smell of hospitals and the uncomfortable feeling you get sitting there while the other person is in the bed, sick as a dog. This visit wasn’t so bad, however. My grandmother and I sat and talked for two hours, probably the longest amount of time I’ve ever sat and really talked to her since I was a kid.
She has always had quite a knack for upsetting me and loves to call me an old maid. She called me an old maid again last week but this time she started laughing and said, “You like it though, don't you? You like being single?” I shrugged and said “yeah” and she said: “That doesn't mean you couldn't have a baby though, does it?” She also told me I looked like a million bucks and that she always thought I was too good for my ex-boyfriend. She never liked him, she said, because she thought he was an old man!! Sitting with her like that and talking was so much easier than when my sister is there. It's funny but my grandmother gets kind of stilted around my sister, who is a nice enough person but fairly boring. My grandmother told me all kinds of things I’d never heard about, like how I reminded her of herself and that she wished she had lived in a different time. She said my dad's father (who died of tuberculosis when my dad was only a year old) had been her one true love. She was a single mother until my father was 5 or 6, when she married the man who became my grandfather. When my grandmother got re-married, she had to move in with her husband, his father and his brother. She said they treated her like a maid. After about two years of putting up with “crap from them” she borrowed money from her sister for a down payment on a house. “I told your grandfather I had bought a house and was leaving and taking the children with me,” she told me. “He could come with me if he liked or continue living with his father and his brother. He was the first one up on the morning of the move! “I bet you never thought you had such an old witch as a grandma, huh?!” she said, laughing. “No, I always knew it,” I replied. “I think you and I are cut from the same cloth,” she added. I tend to agree with her. I feel kind of sad thinking about her right now. She’s out of the hospital but my mother told me that my father and my uncle are seriously considering putting her in an old age home. If I know her like I think I do - I suspect they’re in for a helluva fight.
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