Today in: emails from my grandmother. Tomorrow is her birthday, so if you’re a wine drinker, have a glass for her. Although it sounds like she’ll be having a few herself tonight
https://twitter.com/anne_theriault/status/1316106779609231360?s=21

I know I have told this story before, but it is very representative of my grandmother. In the 70s, she and my aunt were both reading Salem’s Lot. My aunt decided to scare her by coming and scratching on the screen door when she knew my grandmother was reading exactly that part

My grandmother decided to get her revenge, but bided her time. A few months later, when they had both just read Carrie, my grandmother waited until a night when my teenaged aunt was having a sleepover. She waited until she knew they were about to come home and go upstairs

And then she went and hid behind my aunt’s bedroom door with a knife. Like the mom in Carrie. So that when my aunt and her friend came upstairs, they found this unhinged woman waiting to jump out at them. And that is the kind of person my grandmother was and is.

But she is also a person who, after 9/11, went out and bought herself Islam For Dummies because her small town Nova Scotia neighbours were making a lot of ignorant comments and she wanted to be informed enough to counter them

And when she was young, she absolutely looked like a film star (this is her when she was 22? 23? My dad is the kid in the high chair

Another favourite story I have about her is that she wasn’t allowed to get an after school job as a teenager. Her mother had a very traumatic childhood where she had to work a lot, so she decided her children would have real childhoods where they never worked. It backfired!

My grandmother was constantly trying to trick her way into a job. At one point she convinced their neighbours, who owned a grocery store, to tell her mother that they needed a new employee and only Betty would do. Somehow this worked.

So for a few months my grandmother had a job at a grocery store, except that she ate too much of their expensive, imported fruit without paying for it and eventually they had to let her go because she was costing them too much money

The story of how my grandparents ended up together is another job story. My grandfather was my grandmother’s boss. She was beautiful and 19 and fascinating, so he kept asking her out. She thought he was the most intolerable bore and kept saying no.

Then one week she needed some time off, so she said, “if I go on one (1) date with you, will you let me have next Thursday off?” And he was like, yeah, sure. So they went out that weekend and she realized he was actually very kind and charming under all his awkwardness

Then a few weeks later they got engaged but had to keep it a secret at the office because, you know, work. But my grandfather in particular had a hard time with this because she was such an utter babe.

When my grandmother had my dad at the age of 21, the one thing she knew was that she didn’t want to be a stay at home mom. She went back to work when he was 6 weeks old. Telling the story, she’d always say, “I was 21, do you think I wanted to stay home changing DIAPERS?”

When I had 9yo, she was baffled that I breastfed him. To her, formula was a tool of liberation that meant that she didn’t have to be stuck at home with her kids like her mother had been. But she also kept trying to feed my kid stuff like butter and sugar when he was an infant

She also once tried to give me an anti-smoking talk that devolved into her staring dreamily into the middle distance and describing all the best places/times to smoke (after dinner, in the car, when your best friend’s on the phone, “Annie if it wasn’t so expensive I’d do it now”)

Incidentally, my grandfather smoked for years after my grandmother quit (and he told her he’d also quit in solidarity). As kids we would catch him smoking out the bathroom window, frantically saying “don’t tell your grandmother!!” (We never did, we loved being complicit)