BBQCornuts and I got together for a fireside chat about the crazy and strange habits of the dearly departed old people in our lives. Here are a few of the stories. Feel free to share yours in the comments!
THE $33,000 DOG AND OTHER MAGIC MONEY
My great-grandmother lived by herself until she was 90. She had a valid drivers license that actually expires next year and would drive around in her Lexus hitting people in the grocery store parking lot and paying them off with cash that she kept on her person at all times (usually in pill bottles). Anyways, she always had a maltese, one of which lived to 19 years old (Jojo) and another that now lives with my parents. After the hurricane hit, my great-grandmother, Mama Meli, was convinced that there was something wrong with the foundation of her house. After engineers and specialists couldn’t figure out what the problem was they gave her a check for $33,000. It turned out that the weird spotting on the floor and in the corners of the rooms was actually the dogs dried pee.
Amelia would also randomly ask my grandmother what they were going to do when my grandfather (her youngest son) died. She always assumed she was going to outlive everyone and loved to go everywhere with us. She would also go with us to the casino sometimes, and every once in a while she would convince an attendant that she had lost $100 or other amount. She legitimately believed she had lost the money but we were never sure. One time, my grandmother found that she had put the money in an adjacent machine instead of the one where she was sitting. Either way, the attendants would usually give her a credit on whichever machine she was playing.
THE 101 DAMNATIONS
Mama Meli also loved to go and buy our Christmas presents on her own. I would usually get a coloring book and then one hundred dollars in a card. Most of the time her presents were a lot more exciting (read strange). My brother happened to be obsessed with the 101 Dalmatians for awhile and that year he got a present that happened to be dalmatian riding a train. The weird thing about it was that Mama called it one of the 101 damnations and it wasn’t actually a children’s toy but a dog toy.
My mother and her sisters also got a strange array of presents one year. The youngest got a shrunken cashmere sweater. My mom, the middle child, got a used, burned oven mitt and a toaster from the seventies (I still think that toaster makes the best toast). The oldest and first granddaughter got a pair of diamond earrings but upon further inspection we found that they were mismatched.
Her cards were equally entertaining. My mother’s remarried name is Bryan which she would regularly spell as “Brain” on her cards. Since she only had a third grade education we usually overlooked her spelling errors but always found this one funny. To her, my name also happened to be “Jerry” and not Jarrod. Therefore, I respond to both.
THE LITTLE BAGS THAT COULD
Like I said, she would always pack things in bags and kept all kinds of plastic bags. She would hide her jewelry in it and occasionally would throw those very bags away. The total value of her unaccounted for jewelry was astronomical. She would also hide food in different containers. For example, cereal would be in a completely different box. She also had what she called diabeets but would still horde candy in her purse whenever she was at our house. She also would throw all kinds of food on the floor for the dog even when the dog was in its kennel.
WHITE OUT
My grandfather developed some sort of white-out related OCD in the last few years of his life. It was the dawn of the computer age and his small business didn’t have a computer so he hired me to type for him. He was familiar with white-out, but I got him some white-out tape that he really dug. Suddenly, the man because obsessed with the stuff. He had a bottle in every single color. He even bought some chemical that he could use to keep it from dying out. Then he bought the correction tape strips that come in rolls. He had one in every size, from 1/8″ to 2″ wide. He also had a variety of pens that applied white out. He was so in love with white-out that I would catch him deliberately making mistakes so he could use it to make a correction. Once, I saw him make a spelling error on a post-it note to me. Staying true to character, he got out the white out and corrected the post-it note.
NO YELLOW OR GREEN SKITTLES, EVER!
One year my Mom became obsessed with Skittles (I think old-age OCD might run on that side of the family). I mean, hardcore obsessed. She bought giant, industrial-sized bags of candy. The house was riddled with candy dishes full of skittles. However, she only ate the red, purple and orange ones. She very much disliked the yellow and green ones. You might think she’d throw those out but, no, she kept every single one of them. She had bowls upon bowls of yellow and green skittles placed in the living room in case someone stopped by the house and had an uncontrollable urge for skittles and might take them off of her hands. If lemon and lime didn’t suit you, she wouldn’t let you have even one of the “good” skittles unless you took some of the other ones first. My nephew was the only one who took the bait and every time he visited she would try to force-feed him about 300 Skittles.
SHOW ME YOUR TEETH
When I cleaned out my grandmother’s closet, I was rooting around on a back shelf. Suddenly, I saw teeth. I screamed and jumped back. It was a jar full of the lower plates of dentures. Just the bottom teeth. WTF?
