Sometimes they’re full of wisdom. Sometimes they make you go 
.
My husband’s Grandmother was also the Grand Mixer of Words.
" When I die I want to be cremated and put in a urine"
“I can’t fly in a plane because I can’t breath in high attitude.”
And they always tell it like it is.
" I’m sure glad y’all came to eat dinner with us. I’d been needin’ to get rid of that hamburger meat." :dubious:
The scene: in the car, early 1970’s, silicon valley
The players: my grandmother, and a few of her daughters (my mother and aunts)
They pull up to a stop-sign, where someone has spray-painted “DISCO SUCKS!” The daughters all inwardly cringe, because their mother is very religious and is easily offended by crude language. They pull away from the stopsign in awkward silence. After a few seconds, my grandmother says…
“Margaret…what are disco socks?”
Years ago on Thanksgiving Day one of my great aunts was there. She was very very old and had lived her entire life on her farm with cows and chickens and was the last person I recall without indoor plumbing. Some of us were watching the football game when she finally asked “What are all them fellas fightin’ over”. Some replied that they were fighting over the ball. She said “Well, why don’t they give all of 'em a ball of their own to play with ?”
I grew up living next door to an elderly couple who I called Grandma and Grandpa for the rest of their lives. Grandma was a real pistol, all piss and vinegar. My favorite quote of hers was when she said of a stuck-up girl in our neighborhood, “She thinks her shit’s good to eat.”
Unfortunately she was just pissy enough that when Grandpa died, her eight surviving children and their issue severely curtailed their visits. I think I visited her more often than her family did. It was a chore listening to her “organ recitals” and how unhappy she was, but sometimes I could get her talking about her past, or take her to the bakery or grocery store. I treasure the few mementos she gave me: a framed picture of her and Grandpa in their house, the inside of which I will probably never see again; the handkerchief she gave me on my wedding day, unwrapped, just from her trembling hand, as she told me, “It’s not fancy, but it’s old.” The first time my mother brought her for a visit at my new home out here in the sticks, and she exclaimed, “You’re living in God’s country!”
I can’t think of any particular pithy thing that Grandpa ever said (except that he wouldn’t cross the street to see Ronald Reagan), but I wish I could still talk to him sometimes, adult to adult. I remember how much he loved Grandma (he called her “Curly”) and how he praised her soft skin. And I miss his whisker rubs, which he gave me well into my 20s, whenever I wanted one.
:: sniffle ::
My cousin was driving my grandmother to the store and she was going well over the speed limit. A cop pulled her over. She batted her eyelashes, copped a plea, and then asked the cop if he could overlook her infraction. When he said no, my grandma looked him dead in the eye and said, “Well, you low-life bastard.”
Needless to say, the ticket stuck.
My grandmother is of the Italian persuasion. Every Christmas Eve, she would make the 7 fish dinner (this involved calamari, shrimp, smelts, tuna, and other fish and seafood that I cannot recall).
One year, my mother took her to the store to get the calamari. The clerk comes out, hands my grandmother a bag of frozen squid, and my grandmother inspects it. The clerk, being busy, asks, “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
Still a little puzzled, my grandmother continues to inspect the bag of calamari before looking the clerk in the eyes and asking “Does this bag have the testicles in it?”
My mother walked away, so as not to pee her pants right there, and the clerk began trembling slightly, stifling laughter. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, slowly, smiling. “This bag does, indeed contain tentacles.”
My great-great-aunt, who died in December at age 102, always kept my grandma and me in stitches when we went to see her. She suffered from dementia, so it probably wasn’t nice of us … but we couldn’t help but laugh sometimes.
She always told me that I didn’t know “shit from Shinola.” She was right.
She lived in a nursing home at the end of her life, and loved toast (she was constantly asking for some). One day when my grandma and I were visiting, the kitchen staff had just baked chocolate chip cookies and brought us a plate full. My great-great-aunt took a bite out of one of the cookies and exclaimed, “This is the best damned toast I ever ate!”
For a while, before she ate she’d recite a prayer in English and Norwegian, then sing “Silent Night.”
An old farmer brought his wife to shop at my father’s grocery store. While she was collecting the supplies, he and my Dad stood in the doorway talking. They fell silent for a while and the old man watched his wife of many years wheel her basket around the store. Finally he made this observation which has become a family treasure:
“She ain’t pretty, she ain’t, but she good, she are.”
Zoe that does sound like a family classic.
My ex’s grandmother was in a nursing home and suffering from dementia. We went to visit her one day and during our conversation, she pulled out a tea towel and spent quite a bit of time folding it. We watched her as we talked, folding the towel this way and pressing it out with her hand to make nice creases, then folding it again and pressing it. The conversation petered out as we became engrossed in this excersize. Finally she placed the towel in the middle of the table, neatly folded to a crisp, patted it with her hand satisfactorily and said - *“Just because you can fold a towel doesn’t mean you’ve been everywhere!” *
We managed to make it to the car with straight faces.
My grandmother, who is 84, used to be an English teacher. That make it very funny when she started making up fake words while when playing Upwords (a Scrabble-like game) with my brother and me.
During the moon landing, my grandmother suggested they first toss a dog out to see what happened.
My grandfather (recently departed, Og rest his soul) was a treasure-trove of deeply profound statements. Sure, I don’t fully understand all of them yet, but in the fullness of time mayhap I will. I’ll share some of his more of-quoted nuggets of wisdom with you:
“When it’s gone, it’s gone.”
“We did have fun, and no harm done.”
And the most profound, which I’m sure holds the key to the meaning of life:
“You can make squash outta that thing!”
(Said referring to a pumpkin - maybe you had to be there.)
I’m not sure if I posted this in another thread, but I was delivering pizza to a nursing home, and a nice old lady wished me a “Merry Christmas!” and I wished her the same.
It was sometime around March or April.
Made my night though.
This happened when my grandmother was in her fifties, so I’m not sure it counts as a “senior moment”.
In 1983 or thereabouts (maybe 1984), I and my best friend were at my grandmother’s house, discussing the newly-released album Colour By Numbers and Culture Club in general. My grandmother thought it was wonderful that we were beginning to take interest in the arts. If she only knew…
Robin
My great grandmother was so dammed cool…
Part of the family lived in another state, and my brothers and I had gone out to visit. Great Grandma was about 96 at the time, I think…
My step-grandmother, who I do not like was there (she married my grandfather for his money, and treats him like crap…and he’s just the nicest, most laid back guy. Makes me sick to see what goes on sigh). Anyway, Step-grandma says we need to “do our duty” and take great grandma (whose son she is now married to, if things are a bit confusing) out to lunch. The whole time, great grandma is just rocking back and forth in her chair and smiling, kind of in her own little world, which I just attributed to her age.
At one point, Great Grandma says she needs to use the ladies room, and I volunteer to go with her. Once in the ladie’s room, she looks and me and says, “Can I tell you my secret?” and I say, “Sure, Grandma…go right ahead”
She leaned in conspiritorially and said, “Your step-grandmother thinks I’m deaf. I’m not…I just ignore her because I think she’s a bitch!”
My grandmother loved games - any kind of game. She would play anything with her grandkids - Candy Land, Scrabble, horseshoes, cards, badminton, air hockey. The kids would always win and the parents all thought she was letting them. That is, until they caught her skipping church in order to practice bumper pool so she could beat my cousin.
My grandparents many years before I was born (so I guess they weren’t elderly, but they’ve always been old to me…) had someone over at their house to fix something, or maybe it was to clean something, I don’t remember. Anyways the company sent over a black lady to do whatever it was they were having done, as soon as she introduced herself to my grandmother she replied with “oh, do you know Betty” (Betty being a black person my grandmother knew, convinced ‘they’ all knew each other).
How about something funny they do. My Grandfather (other side of the family) LOVED rummage sales, he came home one day and very proudly showed off his most recent buy, a book called “How to improve your memory.” My mother looked at it and said “You know Dad, you already have that book.” Okay, maybe not so funny, but it was rather funny to me as my Mom told me and my grandma while grandpa was in the back bedroom on his deathbed.
My paternal gramma was a stitch and there are dozens of “Ruth stories” floating around in my head, but here’s the one I heard last:
My mother and my aunt were friends long before my mother married my father. Long before they were my grandmothers, Ruth visited my maternal gramma to pick up my aunt, who was over visiting. My maternal gramma was refinishing the kitchen cabinets and had taken off all of the doors, leaving all of the dishes, food, and pots and pans in the cupboards. Ruth stepped in the kitchen, stopped, looked around, and said: “What on earth were you looking for?”
Not so much age related, but more of a “Yogi-ism”, as my mother died at 70 and was usually sharp as a tack. When asked about a certain persons ethnicity she replied: “Well, his mother is Italian and his father is dead”.
20 years and I’m still crackin’ up over that one.
At a sleep-over with some friends earlier this fall, in waltzed Alice, dribbling prosthetic breasts (quite a few of them) out of a hideous flaming orange sheer nightie. Then she waltzed out. We really didn’t know what to make of it.