An Excuse To Get Fat

When I told my 92 year-old grandmother, Lucy, that I was pregnant with Big Boy she said, “Well, don’t use it as an excuse to get fat.”  And that, obviously, totally sucked because it’s the only reason I got knocked up to begin with.  Now that was shot to hell and I was still stuck with morning sickness and non-alcoholic wine (Thanks for trying, but that’s just sad and insulting) for no good reason. 

Now there were definitely two distinctive sides to my grandmother.  Let me explain.  “Lucy, why did you buy a chainsaw for your 90^th birthday?”  “Well, I needed one.  Do you think those limbs are going to trim themselves?  And none of the rest of you were going to buy it for me.”  And here’s another example:  One day, when my brother and I were both toddlers, my mother left us in Lucy’s care for a few hours. When she returned, she found my brother and I (ages 2 and 4) straddling the chimney while we sat on the roof of the two-story house.  Lucy was replacing some shingles and babysitting:  multi-tasking at it’s finest.  Mom was not exactly pleased, and when she expressed her dismay, Lucy said, “Bonnie, don’t be such a titty baby!”  I’ll never forget one morning when our cousin, Brandie joined us at Lucy’s house.  We were all weeding the garden and raking leaves.  Brandie, age 5, said, “Mama Lucy, I didn’t come here to work.  I came here to play.”  Lucy responded with, “I think your mama dropped you off and the wrong house then.  You know where the phone is.  You had better call her and tell her the mistake so she can take you back home.” 

I mean, she may sound a bit terrifying, but she was also wildly inspiring.  I’ll give you two examples that explain why:  When I was 19 years old and living in Champaign Illinois, Lucy showed up unannounced at my apartment and knocked on the door.  She must have been 76 at the time.  I answered the door and said, “Hi Lucy.  What’s going on??”  She said, “Well, there’s not a DAMN thing to do in Texas right now, so I got in the car and figured I’d drive to college.  I’m hungry.  Let’s eat.”  So we went to Bub’s for some pizza, ate Crunch ‘N Munch while we walked home, and then went to sleep.  She left first thing in the morning and drove the 20 hours it took to get back home.  Two years later I announced to my family that I was moving to Australia.  Well, first my mom called and said, “I was invited to attend a conference in Australia.  I wasn’t going to go, but I guess I will.  We can travel together for a few weeks, and then I can leave you there.  Well, when Mom told her what was going down, Lucy replied indignantly, “Well, I am WAITING for my invitation!”  Man, that led to quite a series of events, but my two favorites are theses:  She was so mad the entire trip because, as she put it, “I can’t understand a damn word they’re saying!”  (That reminded me of a trip we took together to the fabric store when I was in middle school. She asked me what color I wanted my shirt to be, and I said, “Red.”  She said, “It’s not ‘red,’ it’s “ray-ud.”  That led to a long debate about how many syllables were in fact in that word and quite a few others.  I digress…She was also mad because we kept finding t-shirts that said, “Melbourne” or “Brisbane” or “Great Barrier Reef.”  She said, “None of my friends know what that is. I just want a bunch of shirts that say, A-U-S-T-R-A-L-I-A with a picture of a kangaroo or a koala bear.”  So while Mom attended inspiring conferences and hiked rain forests with new friends, Lucy and I searched for $6 (No shirt should ever cost more than $6. If it does, you just need to go home and make it yourself) AUSTRALIA shirts (with or without marsupial adornments).

She was obviously tough as nails, so it may sound contradictory, but my grandmother never left the house without her hair done and her “face on.”  And she was beautiful, with or without the fixings, until the day she left us.  She wore just the right make-up to compliment her fair skin and gorgeous blue eyes and made you notice her beauty, rather than her make-up. She always had dyed red hair, and one day I asked her, “Lucy, what color is your hair naturally?”  She replied, “Well, I don’t know.  I’ve been dying it since I was 14, and before that we only had black and white pictures.”  I’ll never forget the day my cousin Jeffrey asked her, “Do old ladies still have to shave their legs, or does the hair just stop growing.”  She PULLED over the car, took off her seat belt, turned around, and replied, “When I am an old lady, I will let you know.”  Yikes.  She used to watch her “stories” every day.  When we were kids and spent the summer with her, we watched them too.  From her commentary, I learned that no woman should dye her hair too dark past a certain age (currently clearing my throat), if you act cheap you look cheap, and it’s never the wrong time of day to wear all of your diamonds. 

Lucy died before my kids were born, and it really makes me sad.  By the time they were this age (1 and 3) she would have had them digging up giant tree roots with pic axes and hoes, mowing the ill neighbors’ lawns, baking vanilla drop cookies, and absolutely dominating every card game of “war” within a hundred-mile radius.

Right after Lucy told me not to get preggo fat, she told me that (at the age of 92) she was going to get knee replacement surgery.  She didn’t know I had any idea what was going on, but my mom had already told me that Lucy had to do some major doctor-shopping to find someone who was willing to perform an elective surgery on a 92 year-old woman with a history of heart disease and heart attacks.  So I asked her why she wanted to do that.  I said, “For God’s sake Lucy, you walk well enough to mow your own lawn with a push mower.  Why do you need surgery?”  She said, “Well, the only reason I can walk is that I’m holding onto that damn mower!”  “Well, why don’t you just use a walker?”  Uh oh.  Wait for it.  Wait for it.  “I will NOT push around a walker like some damned old lady, thank you very much!”  So there you go, tough-as-nails meets the beauty queen.  She made it through the surgery, but she never fully recovered.  Less than three months later she was gone.  It was heartbreaking, but I had never forgotten something she had told my brother and myself years ago.  “If I ever lose my mind and they want to throw me into a home, you just find the biggest cliff you can and roll my wheelchair off the edge as quick as you can.”  In the end, it was another heart attack that got her, and she lived alone in her own home until the day before she died.  There are a million reasons why I wish she were still here, but most of all I want to run naked through her house (in all of my diamonds, of course) screaming, “Hey look, Lucy!  I’m still skinny!”