Centenarian
Aug. 22nd, 2004 01:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jere7myMy great-aunt Mary has been alive for 100 years and two days. Twelve years ago she had heart bypass surgery that was supposed to grant her an additional five years of life. I saw her today, probably for the last time, at her birthday celebration in Pittsburgh.
It was...interesting. The to-do was organized by my grandfather, who is a Character: sort of a mad nonagenarian social steamroller, who feuds with the cook at his nursing home and organizes his own music show and tells elaborately nested stories. (If he begins to tell you about buying six boxes of chocolates for six friends, you know you'll hear a sub-story about each one of the six, and possibly some sub-sub-stories, before he gets around to finishing the chocolate story.) I learned today that he used to be known as Crazy Eddie, which is perfect.
The great thing is, there are two of him. I met my great-uncle Roy, who seems as nutty as Grandpop, but rather more jovial. He has trifocals, and when the two of them got into a sort of public declamatio, Roy spinning sub-sub-sub-stories off Grandpop's sub-sub-stories, it was a thing to see. My dad, who is about the only one who can handle Grandpop, was there, looking a lot like Paul Newman and reminding me how much I like him.
Aunt Mary is losing her memory, but she seems rather sassy about it. When discussing the ages of her siblings, she stopped and said, "Goodness, I must be in my nineties." "Actually," someone said, "you're one hundred." "Am I?" she replied. "Oh my." She's in a wheelchair, of course, but alert and healthy and coy.
I think it meant a lot to my grandfather that I came—he and I do not always see eye-to-eye, but I think this was a sort of reconciliation for us—and it meant a lot to me that K. drove us the 180 miles each way to attend. I'm glad we went.
We stopped in to see![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
carpenter, since she was only half an hour away. She was also being visited by Josh B., giving us four players for the bean game. carpenter took us to a lovely Thai restaurant for dinner...which lost power between the appetizers and the main course. Our meals were illuminated by a succession of rapidly dwindling birthday candles, each of which lasted about five minutes before being replaced by a hustling waiter. We talked about the SWAPA/LiveJournal schism, there in the flickering dark, and it was good, I think.
carpenter gave us lengthy but impressively easy-to-follow directions from Pittsburgh to the Turnpike, and we got home a bit before midnight. Since I woke at 8:30 this morning, I'm a bit sleepy. *yawn*
It was...interesting. The to-do was organized by my grandfather, who is a Character: sort of a mad nonagenarian social steamroller, who feuds with the cook at his nursing home and organizes his own music show and tells elaborately nested stories. (If he begins to tell you about buying six boxes of chocolates for six friends, you know you'll hear a sub-story about each one of the six, and possibly some sub-sub-stories, before he gets around to finishing the chocolate story.) I learned today that he used to be known as Crazy Eddie, which is perfect.
The great thing is, there are two of him. I met my great-uncle Roy, who seems as nutty as Grandpop, but rather more jovial. He has trifocals, and when the two of them got into a sort of public declamatio, Roy spinning sub-sub-sub-stories off Grandpop's sub-sub-stories, it was a thing to see. My dad, who is about the only one who can handle Grandpop, was there, looking a lot like Paul Newman and reminding me how much I like him.
Aunt Mary is losing her memory, but she seems rather sassy about it. When discussing the ages of her siblings, she stopped and said, "Goodness, I must be in my nineties." "Actually," someone said, "you're one hundred." "Am I?" she replied. "Oh my." She's in a wheelchair, of course, but alert and healthy and coy.
I think it meant a lot to my grandfather that I came—he and I do not always see eye-to-eye, but I think this was a sort of reconciliation for us—and it meant a lot to me that K. drove us the 180 miles each way to attend. I'm glad we went.
We stopped in to see
carpenter, since she was only half an hour away. She was also being visited by Josh B., giving us four players for the bean game. carpenter took us to a lovely Thai restaurant for dinner...which lost power between the appetizers and the main course. Our meals were illuminated by a succession of rapidly dwindling birthday candles, each of which lasted about five minutes before being replaced by a hustling waiter. We talked about the SWAPA/LiveJournal schism, there in the flickering dark, and it was good, I think.carpenter gave us lengthy but impressively easy-to-follow directions from Pittsburgh to the Turnpike, and we got home a bit before midnight. Since I woke at 8:30 this morning, I'm a bit sleepy. *yawn*
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Date: 2004-08-22 08:01 pm (UTC)SWAPA/LiveJournal schism
Date: 2004-08-24 06:38 pm (UTC)