about my granny.

(note:  this isn’t a true story, but another imagining; a fictional story based on my grandmother & her life.  my actual granny doesn’t drink.)

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I know you ‘posed to thank God ever morning and be happy He woke you up, and I am, but sometime I won’t mind if He didn’t. I’m old. Cain’t go where I want, do what I want. All day, I just sit, sit, sit; sit so much I cain’t tell the days apart no more. I wake up, I think I know what day it is, what time it is, but then somebody yells, “Mama! What you doin’ up, it’s 3 in the mornin’! Go back to bed!” or “Mama! You need to get up out the bed and eat some dinner!” Always yellin’. Make me sick.

Cold out today, I think. Don’t make me no matter; I be cold no matter snow or shine out there. Sometime I just sit on the couch or lay in the bed (usually the bed) and listen to the weatherfolk talk about cold fronts and heat waves and I turn my head to the side, squint my eyes tryin’ to understand. I shake my head ‘cause I cain’t remember, don’t recall how it feels to know the difference between thangs. Hot and cold? Puh. When you got old blood on top of takin’ blood thinners and whatever else Brenda throws in that pill box ever week, it don’t make no matter. In the end, it won’t matter to nobody, and here they got this fancy weatherman in a fancy Sunday suit, done spent up all this money to buy television cameras and computers covered in Christmas lights to tell us stuff that don’t make no difference no way. Waste of money.

They oughta gave that money to me. I could do plenty good with it. I’d get all my grandbabies everthang they needed—send ‘em to school, see that they clothed and fed good. I’d call up Kenny and see if he need anythang for his wife or that new baby comin’ along and put some money on his oldest one’s college schoolin’. I maybe get Annalea a soft new bed to sleep in upstairs, make sure she comfortable. I’m so tickled to have her back, I wanna make sure it’s happy as it can be for her. And I’d send Brenda someplace nice, real, real nice for a week and let her get some rest from me (and I get some from her, too). And then, once I tooked care of everbody else, I’d have somebody take me up to Walgreens or the Krogers and get me all the chocolate I could ever eat in the rest of my lifetime.

I didn’t never touch the stuff when I was young, but ooh boy! I’d eat ding dongs and Oreos for breakfast and rocky road ice cream for dinner if I could. But I cain’t, of course. Seem like evertime I sit down at the table they pushin’ somethin’ else I don’t want in my face. Toast and jelly, fishsticks and peas. Well, I do love fishsticks and peas, I confess that, but they make me eat it when I don’t want it. “Mama, you cain’t take all them pills and not put no food in your stomach, it’ll make you sick!” Shit. Already sick, I say. But I know they don’t leave me ‘lone til I eat it, so I eat it. With my eyes closed, ‘cause it piss everybody off. You can make me eat, but you cain’t make me look at you.

So I take a bite, close my eyes and remember. Church. The donut shop. Mamie. When Dean was borned and how nobody could believe I did it all by myself in Ray’s old dusty pickup truck (that’s how come we came to call Dean Dusty as a nickname—it sound better than “truck baby,” which LuBell took to callin’ him). I had Dusty on a Wednesday, kissed Poe goodbye before the sun came up and had a baby wrapped and waitin’ on him when he come home sundown. Then I showed up at Sugar Jane’s on Saturday night in a brand new dress and big brimmed hat, not a piece of brown on my new white heels even though we had to walk down a old dirt road to get there, me and my cousin Patience. I walked to the kitchen and ordered a whiskey and Lord, honey, they just went crazy. “Zenith James, ain’t you home with that baby?” I grin and say that the kids takin’ care of him. “Ain’t you feedin’? You know if you drink this, it’ll be in your milk?” I grin again, say it’ll put hair on his chest. Then I walk out to the main room, click my heels on the wood floor in time with the music. Down home bluuuuuues, down home bluuuuues…

I open my eyes and Brenda lookin’ at me like I’m a alien. I don’t know how long I been settin’ there with my eyes closed, noddin’ my head to B.B. King. Don’t care either. I close my eyes again.

I ask for a cup of coffee a few times and they tell me no, louder and louder each time, swearin’ I done drunked a whole pot already. That’s all anybody say around here anymore. No, no, no. Piss. I get up from the table, toddle off to my room to look at them know-nothing weathermen some more before I go off to sleep and dream. Or just lay thinkin’, I don’t know which.

Sometime I can’t tell sleep from bein’ awake no more.