I Want To Tell You About My Grandparents
All of my grandparents are gone now, which is a really weird feeling. I never really knew my grandfathers, in fact I only met one of them. But my grandmothers were such a huge part of my life, and it feels weird that I haven't talked about them much here, because it just feels painful and hard. But now I think I am at a place where I can talk about them from a place of happiness and wonder at the fact that I got to meet these beautiful people and share so many moments with them in life.
Like a lot of kids, my parents were always busy working, they both had nine-to-five jobs that were physically demanding, and they were overworked and underpaid, so I got left with my grandparents a lot while my brother who was older was allowed to run around with his friends or go to after-school programs. I had no problem with this, because I was antisocial and I liked my grandmothers both better than I liked other kids my age and my friends at school. Even as an eleven year old boy, I had the personality of a woman in her late fifties. What can I say, some things never change.
My grandpa Al died before I was born, when my father was about seven or eight, I think. After he died my Nanny Better had a nervous breakdown; she grew up an orphan in the Canadian foster care system and had bounced around from group home to orphanage to foster home, etc, from what I've been told, and she ended up sending both my uncles to live with our great aunt Lillian, while my father, who apparently had intense behavioral issues, was sent to live in a boys home for a few years. At some point, Betty got her life together, she bought an apartment building and turned the bottom floor into a commercial space, opening a convenience store with her girlfriend Josie, who we grew up knowing as aunt Josie, because I guess everybody thought we were too young to understand that Grandma was dating a woman, lol. That convenience store is still there, in fact I went there a lot growing up after they'd sold it. It's called Sam's now and it has been since the eighties or mid-nineties, at least. In the early two-thousands my Nanny Tony, who lived a few doors down, would send me there with spare change and I'd buy Miami Cakes and pizza pockets galore before going back to her place to watch unhealthy amounts of TeleToon.
Anyway, Betty eventually ended up selling the store and becoming a librarian of all things. She loved books, but not as much as she loved cats and cigarettes. I have fond memories of listening to Stephen King audiobooks on tape at her and Josie's apartment in the West Side, in the dark, while trying to fall asleep, at like seven years old. I was traumatized. Baby's First Audiobook!
Nanny and Josie lived together for years, even after they broke up. The last time I saw them together was in 2015; I blogged about it on this blog, actually, if you go back to summer 2015, it's when I got my first tattoo with my cousin Amelia. I remember that summer so fondly, we went swimming and saw a truck back into the water and get stuck, we went to Dixie Lee and got decent greasy chicken and iced green tea, we walked every night with Josie and her sisters. Nanny and Josie had moved to Josie's hometown at that point so she could be with her family, I think they moved around 2013 or so. Amelia visited them dozens of times, but I'd only ever gone that once.
A short time after that trip Nanny Betty was moved back to our city, into a home, as her condition deteriorated and her dementia got worse. I'm ashamed to admit it, and it's a big regret for me, but I never went to see her while she was in the home for the last three years of her life; I was afraid, because I knew my father and I are probably both going to get dementia one day, it's like a family curse, and my father is already showing signs. I knew from Amelia and other relatives that she often didn't know who they were, that she often didn't know where or when she was. I couldn't see her like that, and the idea of it sent me into an anxiety attack every time, so my parents tried to shield me from the questioning and prodding of the rest of our family to the best of their ability.
Everybody tells me I'm like my uncle John, Betty's son, Amelia's father, because we both love reading and books, and we're both writers, and the truth is I think I'm like him because we're both like her. It comes from her, the love of books and stories, and police procedural dramas. She babysat me for years in elementary and middle school and she was always watching some form of CSI or Criminal Minds.
Nanny Betty always had a cat calendar on every surface, and cat plushies, and cat figurines, and more, and one of the keepsakes I have from her is a tiny cat statue on my bookshelf, it's white and blue and very elegant looking, even though I'm sure she bought it at a local dollar store sometime around like 2004.
On the other side of the family, there's my mom's parents. I only met her father once, when I was very young. He wasn't close with anybody in the family, and when my parents got married years and years ago they sent him money for a plane ticket and a hotel but he never came. My mom talked to him on the phone occasionally, but I never had much interest in him. He died a few years ago and my mom found out he'd had more kids and she has a half-brother and half-sister out there, who she's had a little contact with here and there.
Her mother, though, my Nanny Tony, was a HUGE part of my life. Nanny Betty and Josie always favored Amelia and my brother Brandon over me, which was very hurtful as a kid. I felt like I was the odd one out in the family who nobody wanted. But Nanny Tony clearly favored me, to the point where I truly believe I was her favorite person in the world. She died very suddenly when I was eleven, and my last words to her, a few weeks before that, were 'I love you' which brings me a lot of comfort even now that I'm an adult.
I would go to Nanny Tony's almost every weekend, Friday to Sunday. Amelia's maternal grandmother Lillian lived right down the street, so if she went to her place we could both hang out and play as much as we wanted, which was amazing.
Nanny Tony made the best scrambled eggs I've ever had in my life, and I always demanded she make them for me. I still try to make them like she did and I always fail. She loved Christmas movies and romantic comedies, and her house was a hub of activity, there was always several friends and family members coming and going, at all hours. If I slept in on the couch too long the living room got so crowded people would sit on my legs and wake me up. When my parents got into a bad argument my mom would storm out and take me and my brother to her place. We went there every holiday, and I remember one year on Easter she and my uncle Chicken, who passed away last year of a heart infection, put on the horror movie Boogeyman. Traumatized my dumb ass for life. Watching it now doesn't do anything for me though, it's so corny in retrospect.
Nanny Tony also smoked like a chimney. Her and Nanny Betty would sometimes meet up at the bingo parlor and were bingo buddies for years before they had a falling out and turned icy with each other. (Drama, drama!)
My mom took on Nanny Tony's personality trait of wanting to feed everybody all the time, although at this point I don't know if it's really a personality trait or a genetic disposition Greeks have towards hospitality and wanting to force-feed people. Both of them can cook a good damn meal. My mom is vegetarian and eats a mostly vegan diet now, but she still cooks meat dishes for my dad and I sometimes, like last night she cooked an amazing ham for us.
I have very fond memories of running in and out of the kitchen while Mom and Nanny Tony cooked family dinner, and how various cousins and uncles and family friends and whoever they were all dating at the time would come over to eat with us. Everybody loved her. At her funeral they printed out cards with her portrait and the caption 'Queen of Duke Street' which seems pretty damn accurate to me. I used to sit with her on her front stoop all morning, watching people pass by, and more than half of them inevitably stopped to say hi and chat with her.
I'm going to hop off now, since I think I've successfully conveyed how awesome these women were. They formed who I am and who I'll always be, and I'm eternally grateful I got to know them.
Like a lot of kids, my parents were always busy working, they both had nine-to-five jobs that were physically demanding, and they were overworked and underpaid, so I got left with my grandparents a lot while my brother who was older was allowed to run around with his friends or go to after-school programs. I had no problem with this, because I was antisocial and I liked my grandmothers both better than I liked other kids my age and my friends at school. Even as an eleven year old boy, I had the personality of a woman in her late fifties. What can I say, some things never change.
My grandpa Al died before I was born, when my father was about seven or eight, I think. After he died my Nanny Better had a nervous breakdown; she grew up an orphan in the Canadian foster care system and had bounced around from group home to orphanage to foster home, etc, from what I've been told, and she ended up sending both my uncles to live with our great aunt Lillian, while my father, who apparently had intense behavioral issues, was sent to live in a boys home for a few years. At some point, Betty got her life together, she bought an apartment building and turned the bottom floor into a commercial space, opening a convenience store with her girlfriend Josie, who we grew up knowing as aunt Josie, because I guess everybody thought we were too young to understand that Grandma was dating a woman, lol. That convenience store is still there, in fact I went there a lot growing up after they'd sold it. It's called Sam's now and it has been since the eighties or mid-nineties, at least. In the early two-thousands my Nanny Tony, who lived a few doors down, would send me there with spare change and I'd buy Miami Cakes and pizza pockets galore before going back to her place to watch unhealthy amounts of TeleToon.
Anyway, Betty eventually ended up selling the store and becoming a librarian of all things. She loved books, but not as much as she loved cats and cigarettes. I have fond memories of listening to Stephen King audiobooks on tape at her and Josie's apartment in the West Side, in the dark, while trying to fall asleep, at like seven years old. I was traumatized. Baby's First Audiobook!
Nanny and Josie lived together for years, even after they broke up. The last time I saw them together was in 2015; I blogged about it on this blog, actually, if you go back to summer 2015, it's when I got my first tattoo with my cousin Amelia. I remember that summer so fondly, we went swimming and saw a truck back into the water and get stuck, we went to Dixie Lee and got decent greasy chicken and iced green tea, we walked every night with Josie and her sisters. Nanny and Josie had moved to Josie's hometown at that point so she could be with her family, I think they moved around 2013 or so. Amelia visited them dozens of times, but I'd only ever gone that once.
A short time after that trip Nanny Betty was moved back to our city, into a home, as her condition deteriorated and her dementia got worse. I'm ashamed to admit it, and it's a big regret for me, but I never went to see her while she was in the home for the last three years of her life; I was afraid, because I knew my father and I are probably both going to get dementia one day, it's like a family curse, and my father is already showing signs. I knew from Amelia and other relatives that she often didn't know who they were, that she often didn't know where or when she was. I couldn't see her like that, and the idea of it sent me into an anxiety attack every time, so my parents tried to shield me from the questioning and prodding of the rest of our family to the best of their ability.
Everybody tells me I'm like my uncle John, Betty's son, Amelia's father, because we both love reading and books, and we're both writers, and the truth is I think I'm like him because we're both like her. It comes from her, the love of books and stories, and police procedural dramas. She babysat me for years in elementary and middle school and she was always watching some form of CSI or Criminal Minds.
Nanny Betty always had a cat calendar on every surface, and cat plushies, and cat figurines, and more, and one of the keepsakes I have from her is a tiny cat statue on my bookshelf, it's white and blue and very elegant looking, even though I'm sure she bought it at a local dollar store sometime around like 2004.
On the other side of the family, there's my mom's parents. I only met her father once, when I was very young. He wasn't close with anybody in the family, and when my parents got married years and years ago they sent him money for a plane ticket and a hotel but he never came. My mom talked to him on the phone occasionally, but I never had much interest in him. He died a few years ago and my mom found out he'd had more kids and she has a half-brother and half-sister out there, who she's had a little contact with here and there.
Her mother, though, my Nanny Tony, was a HUGE part of my life. Nanny Betty and Josie always favored Amelia and my brother Brandon over me, which was very hurtful as a kid. I felt like I was the odd one out in the family who nobody wanted. But Nanny Tony clearly favored me, to the point where I truly believe I was her favorite person in the world. She died very suddenly when I was eleven, and my last words to her, a few weeks before that, were 'I love you' which brings me a lot of comfort even now that I'm an adult.
I would go to Nanny Tony's almost every weekend, Friday to Sunday. Amelia's maternal grandmother Lillian lived right down the street, so if she went to her place we could both hang out and play as much as we wanted, which was amazing.
Nanny Tony made the best scrambled eggs I've ever had in my life, and I always demanded she make them for me. I still try to make them like she did and I always fail. She loved Christmas movies and romantic comedies, and her house was a hub of activity, there was always several friends and family members coming and going, at all hours. If I slept in on the couch too long the living room got so crowded people would sit on my legs and wake me up. When my parents got into a bad argument my mom would storm out and take me and my brother to her place. We went there every holiday, and I remember one year on Easter she and my uncle Chicken, who passed away last year of a heart infection, put on the horror movie Boogeyman. Traumatized my dumb ass for life. Watching it now doesn't do anything for me though, it's so corny in retrospect.
Nanny Tony also smoked like a chimney. Her and Nanny Betty would sometimes meet up at the bingo parlor and were bingo buddies for years before they had a falling out and turned icy with each other. (Drama, drama!)
My mom took on Nanny Tony's personality trait of wanting to feed everybody all the time, although at this point I don't know if it's really a personality trait or a genetic disposition Greeks have towards hospitality and wanting to force-feed people. Both of them can cook a good damn meal. My mom is vegetarian and eats a mostly vegan diet now, but she still cooks meat dishes for my dad and I sometimes, like last night she cooked an amazing ham for us.
I have very fond memories of running in and out of the kitchen while Mom and Nanny Tony cooked family dinner, and how various cousins and uncles and family friends and whoever they were all dating at the time would come over to eat with us. Everybody loved her. At her funeral they printed out cards with her portrait and the caption 'Queen of Duke Street' which seems pretty damn accurate to me. I used to sit with her on her front stoop all morning, watching people pass by, and more than half of them inevitably stopped to say hi and chat with her.
I'm going to hop off now, since I think I've successfully conveyed how awesome these women were. They formed who I am and who I'll always be, and I'm eternally grateful I got to know them.
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