My grandmother on my father’s side once looked at my sister, me, and an assorted lot of cousins all sitting on the couch in her living room and said, “Damnit kids, I told you. Don’t get Jell-O on the davenport.”
We were eating ice cream and hadn’t a clue about any davenports.
My first basketball memory, though, did happen on that davenport.
It was winter, 1990, and the Bad Boy Pistons had just knocked MJ to the hardwood. I watched Grandma, a staunch Detroit Basketball fan, beam while she and Dennis Rodman, who she lovingly called The Worm, pumped their fists high in the air to celebrate. A long ash dangled curiously from the well-smoked cigarette between her fingers. It was all magic.
Grandma might have liked her Manhattans and playing the clarinet, but she loved those cigarettes.
“Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Roll ‘em if you don’t. Well, I started rolling my own at thirteen,” she used to say.
One summer Saturday as raindrops played a beat outside against the house, Grandma told me some music would do us some good. So, she found her old clarinet, blew old tunes for a bit, and even managed to make one short stretch sound almost musical.
Grandma stopped soon after she started, breathed a bunch real fast to catch her breath, took a long pull from her burning heater, and grinned. “Don’t have the lungs I used to, but I still got some juice. Come on, let’s go get a popsicle to celebrate. We earned it.”
Grandma kept Bomb Pops in the freezer because, in her words, “Eating Bomb Pops is like enjoying the 4th of damn July every time you have one.”
Okay, Grandma never said this, but she did always have Bomb Pops in the freezer for us kids to eat between swim sessions in the pool she and Grandpa had in their backyard.
Grandma liked dogs, I think, or at least tolerated them enough to have a run of Dalmatians and Irish Setters with names like Lady and Maude and Seamus in the house when my dad and two aunts were young.
Grandma kept “good, clean books” for the men’s clothing store she and Grandpa ran from just after World War II into the 1980s.
The store had a gumball machine where you could trade one penny for one gumball. Once, after I had stuffed a dime’s worth of chewy sugar gumballs into my mouth, Grandma looked at me, took two long pulls on her cigarette, stubbed it into an ashtray, pushed it closer to where someone was tailoring a new suit, and said, “All that sugar’s gonna rot your teeth.”
One year for Lent we both gave up biting our fingernails. Grandma was in the kitchen watching Days and nibbling at the edges of a ham salad sandwich on white bread when I snuck off the davenport and into another room. I heard Grandma cough, then shout:
“Better not be biting your nails in there. God’s watching.” She paused, then added, “or looking at that naughty book. God’ll see that, too.”
The dirty book was The Naughty Nineties and though I wasn’t looking at it, I was trying to hide my nail biting from her and from God.
Grandma went to a small, blue church about a half mile from home every Sunday, and on more than one occasion told her Catholic husband he was nothing but a lapsed Episcopalian with a good smile and a seductive laugh.
I remember eating dinner one night with my sister, Grandma (the Episcopalian), and Grandpa (the Catholic) at their small wooden table with flaps that took it from a two-seater to a four-seater. It was October, a quarter after 7:00 pm, and Grandpa had splashed his homemade hard apple cider with vodka while Grandma sipped a Manhattan and smoked more than she ate.
She eyed me stalling over the scoop of green beans on my plate.
“What?”
“Grandma, you know I’m allergic to green beans,” I said with my best you wouldn’t want me to get sick here smile.
She took in a big, deep breath between two bigger puffs on her cigarette, which she then swirled in one hand while pointing at me with the other.
“That nonsense might fly with your mother and father but not with me. I know you’re not allergic. Hurry up. Eat your damn green beans. Jeopardy is on soon and your sister and me, well, we got a game of Old Maid to finish before the show starts.”
Friends, we love you. And we’ll see you when we see you.
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