Granny

Before I returned from Florida, I took this picture of my grandmother the week after Thanksgiving. I guess I wasn’t checking what I was doing since the shot was really over exposed. After using this program or that, I was able to get this with its horrible color and unnatural hues. I’m not sure why I took the picture, since she didn’t want to do it, other than she’s 92 and everyday you hear people younger than her dropping off. Plus 2 or 3 days before, I was watching TV and looked over at her, only to see her spooning out of a Vaseline jar.

 

“What are you eating?" I asked not really looking for an answer.

“Jean told me to use this,” I think she replied.

I’m not quite sure because all I was doing was looking at the white tasteless gooey stuff stick to her tongue and the edge of her dentures and thinking of how I’d have to find something to scrape that off with and if I should call 911 or poison control.

It’s funny, was this the same woman that I would terrorize each time she came back to my parents home after living with uncle So and So,  and uncle This and That? It wasn’t until I was 17 or 18 that I realized that perhaps those men weren’t uncles of mine since my mother was an only child.

I remembered then that she had been complaining about having dry skin and I decided to wait and see what would happen. 

Nothing really did happen. She had the runs of course a few hours later but by that time my mother was back from wherever she had gone and was able to take care of that. And I was left to think, was this what I have to look forward to if I follow my mother’s gene pool instead of my father’s?

...Drink, and be merry.

So I got this bottle of la Grande Dame Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin at the duty-free shop in Heathrow Airport around 1994 or 1995. It cost me, at the going exchange rate, about $60 and I thought to myself these bitches really know how to rape a guy when he’s at the most vulnerable.

You see it’s always been my theory that at any duty-free store you always pay more than what it would cost at the store on the local High St including the taxes. But I was at the point where I figured I could spend my pounds sterling there or wait until I got back to the States and go to the James Cook, Sam Cook, Harry Cook or whatever the name of the exchange bureau was called then and convert the money into dollars at a rate that would even make a loan shark or a fence blush with shame.

Not being a real champagne drinker, although if I had a choice the cheaper yellow label version of Cliquot has always been my favorite, I always thought that I would save my French import via London for a special occasion. I didn’t know what that occasion would be, but it would have to be a small one because there are only so many people you can share one bottle with. 

But somehow that occasion has never really happened or at least never thought of until it was well after and done with. I mean sure, there has been the birth of this relative or that. There have been the times that I got together with this person or thanked God that I didn’t, but I never thought to reach under the bed, my storage cellar, to celebrate the event. And now that I find on the internet that the going price for an ’89 Grand Dame is around $360 I realize, sad thing,  I’m not sure if I ever will crack the bottle open.

I’ve been having the weirdest dreams recently, all of which have been apocalyptic in nature with me ending up running from something. I may have to change my movie watching to romantic comedies or something instead of the teenage Armageddon types that I like to go for. So with that kind of foreboding and the long dead Mayans telling us that the end of the world will be on Friday, I’m sort of thinking about my bottle now. 

I know I won’t open the Grande Dame on Thursday because that would be just silly, nothing’s happening. But if on Friday there are earthquakes or erupting volcanoes or an invasion from Mars I somehow don’t see myself saying, “Time for the bubbly,” either. But since like TS Elliot I see my world ending, "not with a bang but a whimper," that's probably not worth thinking about.

I wish I had spent that $60 on something else; I would have more than used, lost or broken it by now. All I actually do know is that by next week, I'll still be staring at the bottle and still wondering when.