This weekend, I visited my grandpa. Since grandma’s gone, I check on him a lot. I Love My Grandpa. He is one of the weirdest, funniest people I’ve ever known.
When I got married, my father AND my grandfather walked me down the aisle. This is my grandparents, dancing at my wedding.
As the night progressed, pieces of grandma’s dress started coming off. By the end, she wore only this scandalous shift.
I was raised by my grandparents. When I was 21 I dropped out of college to w*rk full time so I could buy them a house to live in. It’s a two family house, which I also lived in until I got married and moved out. I still pay the mortgage, and grandpa still lives there. Grandma, as was her goal, died in that house. When we bought it, she said, “I’ll never move again, and I am not going to a nursing home. You will have to carry me out of here in a box.” And that is essentially what we did.
So grandpa is on his own now. As a man in his mid-80’s who always had a wife to take care of him, I was afraid that he would give up and let the place fall down around him.
That is not what happened.
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My grandfather has never cooked for himself, and yet he was accustomed to eating very well, as he was married to my grandmother, who could cook her fat ass off. When she died, I started bringing him food, because I feared that he would start living on oatmeal and takeout.
He recently called me to ask how to pick out an eggplant. He was making himself eggplant parmagiana. He’s been learning all his favorites, one at a time.
My grandfather is a very independent guy.
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Over the past couple of months, he has been cleaning the house up. He told me the reasons for this. Namely, my grandmother had packrat tendencies that were too deeply ingrained to argue over while she was alive, so he lived with a lot more stuff than he was comfortable with. And also, because he does not like to clean, and the less stuff he has, the less he has to maintain.
He has a lot in common with me, in that regard. I have taken minimalism almost to a compulsion, because I am very clean and tidy by nature, and yet I am also lazy.
And also, because he knows that he will die someday, and he doesn’t want to leave a lot of shit for me to deal with.
My grandfather is a very considerate guy.
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When I went over this weekend, grandpa was making marinara with pork for himself, for the first time. I showed him how much garlic to use (lots) and how to brown it without burning it, and how to season his “gravy”, and how long to cook it.
I looked around his pantry and found a bunch of expired cans. I kind of expected an argument when I explained that they weren’t safe to eat. That is not what happened.
“Your mother made me buy everything on sale. What’s all this corn? Who could eat this much corn?” he said.
“You know grandma and corn,” I told him.
“Get it out of here. I don’t want this old stuff. I can’t carry all these cans out, they’re too heavy. Take them out for me, please,” he said. I said that I would.
And then, my grandfather farted.
For about 45 seconds. Rrrrriiiiiiiippppppppp.
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I really couldn’t believe my ears. The length of my grandfather’s fart was so astonishing, and then, moments later, my other senses were assaulted.
“Woah,” I said, to nobody in particular, as my grandfather was walking away from me, leaving the fart for me to enjoy, and Sifu was in the next room.
“Damn,” said Sifu, from two rooms away. That’s how loud that fart was.
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Grandpa went into the other room, the fart trailing behind him like a lonely dog. He’s a little hard of hearing, so he probably didn’t hear it, but good lord, he surely felt it. And I know he smelled it, because people in Connecticut could smell that fart, and because he fled the scene of the crime.
He left me with that fart because he knows I won’t say boo to him, and because he’s old enough not to give a flying fuck what I think. He’s old enough to blast nearly a minute-long fart at someone with no remorse.
I love my grandpa.
