Worst. Slumber Party. EVER.

On the morning of Saturday, April 21st, at approximately ten minutes to eight o’clock, my paternal grandmother passed away.

She was my last remaining grandparent, having already lost my paternal grandfather in September of 2012, my maternal grandmother in October of 2012, and my maternal grandfather in August of 2017. I don’t know how many people can stand up and say, “I had all of my grandparents until I was an adult,” so perhaps this isn’t as odd as it feels, but never mind.

She was ninety-three. She went reasonably peacefully, surrounded by family. She had been on hospice for about a month already, and while it wasn’t a surprise, it was still an event, and an upsetting one. It was that call you’re expecting, but until you get it you don’t know how you’re truly going to react.

On Friday night I got a text from an uncle letting me know that hospice had started my grandmother on morphine. She hadn’t really been ‘there’ for about a week already, and she hadn’t been in any pain, but in the final phase she became somewhat restless, and morphine is very often used to soothe and ease in the last stages before death — I knew this to be the case from my six months of work in an assisted living facility. I started calling around to get opinions as to whether I should pack a bag and go up for the night, or if she might make it until Saturday morning, which was when I was planning to visit anyway.

I packed a bag.

I arrived at my uncles’ (plural) house at about eight-thirty on Friday night. (I had just seen my parents, who were en route back home, having been to see my grandmother Friday afternoon and stopping to have dinner with me on their way south.) Present were my uncles whose house my grandmother had been living in since 2014, one uncle/aunt set, another uncle, and one of my grandmother’s two caregivers when I arrived. The caregiver said her goodbye and left shortly after I arrived, and we spent the next several hours sitting with my grandmother in turns — alone or in groups, until it was late enough to think about sleeping, at least for some of us. The aunt belonging to the uncle who had been there alone showed up and they were allocated the air mattress. I was on one arm of the L-bend sofa and my aunt on the other, her respective uncle leaving to go home because someone had to mind their dog for the night. My uncles whose house it was were obviously in their regular bedroom.

What with the weird energy and the unfamiliar sleeping arrangements and ALL THE SNORING, no one really got much in the way of sleep that night. At about two o’clock in the morning a bunch of us were back in my grandmother’s room with pillows and blankets making an attempt in there, but that didn’t really work, either. At that point we were all pretty punchy, so jokes about my aunt not remembering The Act of Contrition from catechism all those years ago and having to Google it were being thrown around. I said I was pretty sure it didn’t count if you attempted it but had to peek down at your phone every other line. The Death Rattle was getting to my uncle something fierce, so I told him to think of it like an old-school coffee percolator, and apparently that helped a bit. (Also, it appears that I can come up with coherent metaphors in the wee hours of the morning on not a lot of sleep, so… one for the resume?) Then there was a rash of cracks about my deceased grandfather — who was a wizard with a blowtorch — having made modifications to the Pearly Gates, reinforcing them with wrought iron, welding them open while waiting for my grandmother.

Eventually I gave up because I am officially too old to sleep on floors, and I went back to the sofa. There was a trickle of followers then, and at about seven the next morning we were all awake again, or more awake than we had been while attempting to sleep while listening to the Sleep Apnea Symphony in It-is-Impossible-to-Sleep-with-All-This-Racket-Going-On Major. My grandmother was still clinging on, and between gallons of coffee and toothbrushing and whatever else we passed in and out of her bedroom, spending the odd moment with her. In the kitchen with one of my aunts, I looked at her and said, “This was the worst slumber party ever.”

That made her laugh, and then we all went off on a tangent, making a list of reasons why it was a terrible slumber party.

“No ghost stories!”

“No junk food!”

“No makeovers!”

While we were all releasing some tension through laughter, one of my uncles was in with my grandmother. That was when she passed.

You never really know what people are waiting for while they’re dying. I think my grandmother wanted to hear a house full of people enjoying themselves, getting along, like everything was during the halcyon days before all of the little familiar civil wars broke out.

When she heard it, she let go.

There were a couple of odd things that happened Saturday morning. After my grandmother passed and we were all in the living room, one of my uncles went to shift to a more comfortable position on the sofa and his hand slipped between the cushions, where he felt something. He pulled out one of my grandfather’s tie clips. I’m not much of a one for ‘signs from the ether’, but in that moment we all agreed that it was a confirmation. She had made it and he was letting us know. The other little phenomenon was that the geese in the pond out back didn’t make a single noise until the funeral home gentlemen drove away from collecting her body. It was a little eerie.

My grandmother’s five children — of whom my father is the oldest — are now faced with the task of organizing the funeral services and dissolving the estate. Thankfully, everything is in good enough order that the funeral part will just about take care of itself.

It’s the estate that’s going to cause problems.

Stay tuned.

This shit is about to get ugly.

Never Try to Best Me at Trivial Pursuit

Somehow, over the course of my thirty-something years, I have developed a varied and vast and useless stockpile of knowledge. It’s great at parties, but beyond that it just sort of sits around in my gray matter waiting for an appropriate moment to pop out when I say, “Fun fact — did you know…?” and bore everyone within earshot to death with the details of the origin of the phrase 'sleep tight' or the mating ritual of the Bird of Paradise or the fact that there’s a species of puffer fish that makes mandala-like sand nests.

I’m complete shit at fractions, and I’m pretty sure this is because the part of my brain that was supposed to be devoted to all things mathematical ended up being the overflow lot for the part of my brain that stores things like the license plate of my boss at my first job and the preamble to the United States Constitution (which I memorized for no reason whatsoever in the fifth grade.)

It’s a little absurd, really. I can recall miniscule factoids I picked up in passing from an episode of QI, but I can’t for the life of me remember where the double letters are and aren’t in the word ‘recommend’. See? Spellcheck did it for me because I put in two c’s and two m’s. Double letters, man. They’re tough sometimes. Caribbean and Mediterranean give me problems, but I can spout off all twenty-three helping verbs without thinking.

I know that Shakespeare died on the anniversary of his birth: April 23rd, 1564 - April 23rd, 1616.

I know that the Romans occasionally flooded theatres and so forth and had mock naval battles, or naumachia.

I can recite the NATO phonetic alphabet.

I can name every freeway on-and-off-ramp along Highway 680 between the 580 interchange and the Benicia Bridge — in both directions. I mean, I suppose this is useful for giving directions, but in this age of GPS it’s hardly necessary.

I know that the average lifespan of the White’s Tree Frog in captivity is sixteen to twenty-two years, the name of the Second Officer on the Titanic was Charles Lightoller, and that Aaron Copland was the composer of what has become known as the ‘Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.’ song, and that the song is actually called ‘Appalachian Spring’.

It’s all so useless, and yet there it sits, in my noggin, cluttering up the place.

As if that weren’t bad enough, it’s not just informational tidbits I seem to collect — I am also some sort of freak quote-parrot. That started early on. I had one of my favorite books memorized and would ‘read’ it to my mother. But I could also repeat large sections of dialogue from films and television shows word-for-word, and with distinguishing character mannerisms. At one point in high school I had an entire thirty-minute episode of the BBC’s Waiting for God down pat.

Who does that?!

Can I remember anything beyond the basics of tectonic plate movement? Nope.

Can I calculate standard deviations? Hell no.

Can I remember anything about the battle of Little Bighorn beyond the fact that it did not go particularly well for Reno, Benteen, and Custer? Nope. But I can remember that it was Reno, Benteen, and Custer because of a song.

And there’s another thing — the manner in which I obtain this information. Sometimes I think it’s osmosis, honestly, but we all know that putting your textbook under your pillow and sleeping on it doesn’t actually work as a study technique. I have always been equal parts a reader and an auditory learner. I’ve picked things up from books and other physical publications, of course, and from interactions with others and all that time I spent in school, but I know that a great deal of the odd little things I know I learned from films and TV shows, and half the time the things I learned weren’t even integral to the main plotline! Well, except in the case of ‘Desk Set’ — now there’s the job I should have had. A researcher for a broadcasting company in the late 1950’s.

I don’t know. My mind makes strange little leaps of logic and I follow where it goes and sometimes what runs out of my mouth is a laundry list of answers to Trivial Pursuit* questions. So don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here with my wealth of useless information and complete inability to figure out percentages but the percentages will make me think of pies which will make me think of fruit and did you know that there was a time in England where raspberry jam was popular but very expensive so people made a substitute and there were craftsmen devoted to carving tiny wooden pips to go in the substitute jam to replicate the raspberry seeds?

I guess it’s just like Bunny Watson says: “I associate many things with many things.”

*I did once win a game of Trivial Pursuit because I knew that Clint Eastwood was the mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.

‘Single Woman at a Gun Club’ Syndrome

I’m going to take a quick minute here to catch up anyone who may have missed the post where I touched on this subject a few weeks ago:

• My maternal grandfather was a gunsmith.
• I own firearms, and started shooting around age eleven.
• I am strictly a target shooter.
• I am NOT an NRA whack job. In fact, they really piss me off.

You’re all caught up. Yay, you!

It’s the time of year for me to start thinking about signing up for my local gun club’s summer trap league. It’s a low-pressure, six-week league, and I had a decent enough time doing it last year that I think I’ll do it again this year.

For those of you not familiar, trap is a shotgun sport where a squad of five people rotates through five positions (or ‘posts’) on a field at a specific yardage, shooting five targets at each position for a total of twenty-five in a round. The targets are clay pigeons, thrown from a central location known as the ‘trap house’, or simply, the ‘trap’.

Traditionally, there are three events in a trap shoot: singles, handicap, and doubles. Singles and doubles are exactly what they sound like — you shoot one target at each post, or you shoot two. Handicap pushes you back two to three yards from your singles yardage depending on the rules of the league or club. As an example, if you shoot your singles at sixteen yards, you would shoot your handicap from eighteen or nineteen. Hey! You learned a thing!

Anyway, back to me and signing up to shoot again this summer — or not.

As a woman shooter, I have found that there are three types of men at a gun club — any gun club. There are the ones who sleaze all over you, the ones who ignore you, and the ones who are genuinely delightful. Let’s start with the easiest ones to catalogue, the Ignorers. The Ignorers aren’t necessarily ignoring you for any particular reason, they are simply there to shoot and not socialize, or to shoot and socialize with the shooters they already know. They will be cordial in passing, but otherwise will leave you to your own devices and carry on with their evening. I take no issue whatsoever with the Ignorers. They do their thing, I do mine, we all go on our merry way, the world keeps turning.

The second set I call the Sleazers. Does what it says on the tin, really. These are the guys who sidle up to you and make some comment about your shooting stance as a thinly veiled hint that they were ogling your ass, or ask, “What’s a nice girl like you doing here all by yourself?” They offer to buy you drinks at the club bar*. They talk your ear off. They mansplain and manspread and ask you questions only to answer them themselves. They’re awful. No joke, I literally had a Sleazer last year ask me, “Why are you here?” I was like, “Um, to shoot? You know, that thing that you do at places like this?” (I got the feeling that the answer he was looking for was ‘to find a man’, and it took every ounce of restraint I had not to clock him one right there in the clubhouse.) In the spirit of total honesty, one of my favorite things is when a Sleazer thinks I can’t possibly know anything more about my gun than the basic load-point-shoot-repeat. Oh, that’s the best, because then I get to hit them with all the specs of my Remington 1100, plus the modifications my grandfather did to custom fit the gun for me, and watch their jaws hit the floor and their man-parts deflate. Do not aim your dick-slinging at me, Sleazers. Mine is bigger.

(Also, you’d think that the Sleazers would have the sense to realize that they’re sleazing on a lady at a GUN CLUB, which usually means that she has a GUN, and, if provoked, could happily add ‘Gun Club Jackass’ to her list of acceptable targets. Just sayin’.)

The last group is my favorite. It is generally comprised of the over-fifties demographic, most of whom have kids or grandkids my age or close to it. They are true gentlemen. They don’t ogle, they don’t catcall, they don’t talk over you, and they don’t make assumptions. They open doors, they temper their language in your presence, and they treat you like a lady even when you’ve managed to smear gunpowder down the side of your nose and not noticed it. (True story.) They are a delight. They remind me of the gentlemen in the league I shot in with my dad and grandfather when I was starting out. They’re happy to have you there, and if they do flirt, it’s in the sweetest, most non-threatening way possible.

Boys, take note.

It’s this last group that’s making me want to sign up for the summer league again this year. I waded through the Sleazers on my own last year and came out unscathed, but it definitely tainted the experience as a whole. I would shoot with the Gentlemen, have some lovely conversations with them between rounds, then go back to the car to run the old bore-snake through the Remington and lock it away before heading to the clubhouse for dinner, where I would more often than not get set upon by a Sleazer. The obvious solution, of course, would be to skip dinner since I have no built-in buddy to eat with, but that’s just allowing the problem to exist without it extending to me, really. I mean, it’s supposed to be a fun evening out. Shoot, eat, enjoy. Would it kill me to miss dinner? No. It’s not terrible, but it’s certainly not Michelin Star quality. And it’s included in the league fee. I mean, come on. Dinner I didn’t have to cook and dishes I don’t have to do? Yes, please. But at the cost of my comfort?

Maybe this year I’ll just bring Tupperware and take my dinner to go.




*Yes, some gun clubs have bars. It’s an honors-system set up whereby shooters are expected to wait to have their drinks until after they’re done shooting for the day, and is enforced by vigilant club officers. Drink and shoot? Banned from the club for life. You make the choice.

#adulting

Remember when you were a kid and the thing you wanted most in the world was to be a grown-up so that you could do whatever you wanted and not have to clean your room or eat your vegetables or do your homework? Remember how great Little You thought that would be? You could make your own rules. You could stay up late and watch as much TV as you wanted and eat cereal for every meal!

Remember how every adult you met seemed to have their lives together? They could do anything. They could fix door hinges and change the oil in their car and go up on the roof to retrieve your ball that got stuck up there without anyone shouting at them to get down before they broke their neck. They had really long conversations on the phone and with other impressive-looking adults about things that made absolutely zero sense to Little You at the time but sounded really mature and important.

Little You was adorable.

Oh, Little You. So young. So impressionable. So, so, SO WRONG.

This adulting lark is pure and unadulterated bullshit. Most of the time I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing at all. Oh, I can pretend just fine, but the eight-year-old who lives inside of me is in constant freak-out mode.

Shit, I have to pay property taxes this month.

Shit, the car needs to be serviced.

Shit, the autopay on the electric bill didn’t go through for some stupid reason, WTF?

And it’s not just financial stuff, it’s everything.

Did I remember to close the bedroom window before I left?

How many more days’ worth of that prescription do I have, and do I need to order it this week or can it wait?

It’s unfair. As we age, our memories go to hell in a handbasket, and the number of things we need to remember increases exponentially. Our health starts to flag. We can’t digest the things we used to. We get winded going up the stairs. Places we didn’t even know we had start to ache. Oh, and hangovers become a real son of a bitch.

Another joy of adulthood is figuring out what’s going to happen to your stuff when you finally shuffle off your mortal whatsit. And before that, you have to deal with your parent’s stuff. I was on Skype with my parents Monday night having a discussion about the shuffling of funds in the event of the inevitable — for any and all of the three of us. I found myself saying things like, “Wait, wait, wait — what’s the yield on the dividends of these investments if we sell the third property versus what it’s bringing in currently as a rental? What are the tax implications if we do one over the other? Can I see the numbers on this so I can do a side-by-side comparison? Not that I don’t trust the guys at Merrill Lynch, necessarily, but I’d still like to see the last ten years of movement on these stocks.”

I’m sitting on my sofa and these words are coming out of my mouth and somewhere inside my brain my inner eight-year-old is jumping up and down screaming, “Where did you learn this stuff? Do you even know what you’re saying?!” The weird thing is that I do. I just don’t feel like I do. There’s a thing called ‘Impostor Syndrome’ which is believed to be suffered by most people at least once in their lives. Put succinctly, it is the fear that even though you do know something, you actually don’t, and someone is going to call you out on it. That’s what my inner eight-year-old was doing to me last night as my parents and I hashed out the potential future of our financial entanglements.

The thing is, I do know things. I can do things. I just have this constant nagging doubt following me around that still makes me want a ‘real grown-up’ when I’m up against something unfamiliar. Like, you know, taxes and stuff. Which is why I have a tax person now. And in my opinion, she’s at least sixteen times the adult I am.

Which makes me wonder what her inner eight-year-old is whispering in her ear?

So, yes, I get to set my own bedtime and dictate my own diet and slack off as much as I want, but it’s not nearly as easy as Little Me thought. There’s too much other shit to do.

Adults have to adult, whether or not they think they’re doing it right.

And sometimes, that means having detailed conversations about estate planning that include exchanges like:

“So, if we don’t set up the secondary trust and your mom just amends her will to include the third property as a line item — which means it still goes straight to you — and she predeceases me, and I somehow become destitute, would you let me have the monthly dividends on it?”

“I dunno, Dad. Are you gonna be a dick about it?” ::Mom cackles insanely:: “I’m sure we can come to some sort of agreement.”