boy/girl toy

If there's a hole in your mattress

The women and men on my dad's side of the family are notorious for living well into their nineties with ample health. My paternal grandma is 85 with a full head of dull red hair. Her brother Howard, who is 2 and a half years her junior has young eyes and a young quickness; he is not stiff at all. He is married to Edna, whose dark Nicaraguan eyes are shrouded by lids so droopy there appears no white in them. They met when Howard was working in the copper mines of Nicaragua. Howard and Edna didn't talk about their children if they have any.
Aunt Gertrude, my great, great, aunt, the sister of my Grandma's mother is a 98 year old talkative, deaf and blind, socialist. She cannot hear if the batteries in her ears are dead and she says her "world is very dim." Though she knows well enough the art of communication to look at your eyes while talking to you. Her skin is like a thin layer of dried glue over her purple veins. Her eyes have lost their shape and are red and weeping. Her fingernails are manicured. Her husband left Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution, and they have lived all over the world together. She can speak a bit of Hindi, Mandarin, Russian. She has been to a Garden Party at the palace in England, and will tell you that Princess Elizabeth's dress had weights sewn into the hem so that it couldn't fly up in the wind. She is sharp.
I went to a Scottish wedding this weekend in Hamilton, Ontario. It was a nine hour drive. My grandma and grandpa did tai-chi in the parking lot of a rest stop on the way. The father of the bride, drunk and barely dancing, kept rolling down his thick, woolen, ceremonial socks, and his dagger kept falling out onto the dancefloor. All he could say at the microphone during champagne was "fantastic, simply fantastic." His son was beautiful, simply beautiful in a kilt.
My mother's side of the family dies early of cancers, clots and hemorrhages.

like going home