Dammit Grandma

It's nice to enjoy a quiet, unemployed afternoon with friends and relatives. Spokane is a quiet town, I'm very unemployed, and large herds of relatives and friends live here, so I've been spending many such afternoons.

It's nice especially to hang out with my grandmother and father, who have always been like second parents to me. Grandma's been smoking and drinking her way to Jesus for nigh on 50 years, though there are indications that the drinking didn't really start until the smoking made it prohibitive to do things like survive without the dulling effects of intoxication. After a series of accidents put an end to her driving, the torrent of vodka has slowed to a trickle. In its place she's grown dependent on God.

The consensus among my mother's siblings and their spouses is that it'll be any day now.

It's been any day now for about two years, and Grandma still chain smokes her Kools and yells at the dog. Of course now she does it from the couch, mostly immobile. She no longer spends hours on hands and knees daily, scrubbing the cigarette ash from the rumpus room concrete and kitchen linoleum--ash she had obviously deposited the previous day while scrubbing the day-before-that's ash from the same linoleum and concrete. She now yells at Grandpa until he does it. The house doesn't smell like it used to. It's menthol and a florid, sanguine rot lately, before it was just menthol. The little differences get you.

Grandma's more stooped now and walks with a lock-jointed shuffle. She has stopped coloring her hair that patently yellow shade of blonde. She no longer has her nails fashioned into blood red spear tips, though they still look sharp. She should be on oxygen. The once indomitable matron of this Renz clan, the unflappable keystone, now breaks down like clockwork whenever someone comes or goes from her life. When visitors she's never seen and didn't know before a given afternoon leave, she weeps. She weeps too when I run to my car to get the Febreeze I keep handy for spraying down their Cairn Terrier. He smells like dog and Fettucine Alfredo--and, of course, menthol and that florid, sanguine rot.

She's more allegory now than person, illustrating the fake distinction between self-sacrifice and self-destruction. The more days now that pass, it gets harder to remember the person she was. That person was probably the most singularly selfless human I've ever met. With it came willful and negligent self-deprivation. Very Christ-like, and with the mouth of a sailor. The more in tune she was to your needs, the less she heeded her own. For thirty years she avoided doctors, complaints and the nagging aspirations she'd had before the steamy night at Pattison's Roller Rink which produced my mom. Now I look at her and see a picture of smoldering death.

Deconstructing the psychology of my grandma is difficult because of the stoicism she displayed as I was growing up and because now she can't remember a goddamned thing. It seems like she'd want to talk about things if she could remember what those things were. So I try to remember for her.

She played her cards close to her chest my entire life, but she once told me that she'd have liked to have been a lawyer. She would have been a prosecutor I think. She couldn't have handled the bullshit rigamarole of litigation or the idea of defending the criminal scum of this world. She really loved Perry Mason. And Columbo. She devoured police dramas. I remember how happy she was when Grandpa gave her that police scanner for Christmas. They all reminded her of a time, I think, before my Mom heralded that string of children borne at that string of west coast military hospitals when those dreams of arguing cases before juries of her peers faded to the more modest act of loudly and defiantly voicing her opinions to anyone in earshot. And if they don't like it, they can go to hell.

Maybe I'm reading too much into the police scanner.

It's been, I think, a life filled with personal disappointment and vicarious triumph, with each sacrifice helping to somehow embolden those around her. She, then, drew success and comfort from the successes of her children and grand children.

No help from me there. Educated, debt-ridden and unemployed, sitting across from her, laying supine on the couch, that smelly ass dog in my lap and I'm just wishing that Grandpa would shut the fuck up about John Kerry so maybe I can remember something else.