Yarns

Grandma Eileen is quite the storyteller. She had a new one for us when mom and I went out to see her yesterday with the annual Mother's Day offering of chocolates.

Her favourite one is about how at our old house at 707 my parents had invited people from both sides of the family to dinner one night. My father's sister brought her daughter Andrea and she and I were playing in the livingroom while the adults hung around in the kitchen.

Suddenly Grandma heard me making an unusual ammount of noise and my mother told me to shut up and go play. When I didn't do that she went to investigate.

Grandma to the rescue! Andrea was pulling my hair and twisting my ear and wouldn't stop when she was asked to so Grandma took hold of her and bit her.

On the odd occasion she says that she bit off Andrea's ear, but usually she doesn't specify the location of the offending bite.

The general consensus among everyone else in the world is that the event happened a little differently.

I used to have an ugly yellow box with yellow wheels of the same kind that you could get at Ikea during the mid '80s that I used to keep my toys in (or was supposed to keep my toys in). I was sitting in it and Andrea was pushing me around. Because it wasn't designed to carry so much weight, it began to scratch the hardwood floors much to my mother's chagrin. Someone had to yell at Andrea to make her stop.

I've never told Grandma's story to Andrea so I have no idea what she thinks of it. Not that it matters much. Like all of my cousins on my father's side, she's too old and cool and mature to have anything to do with me. Her loss.

However, the equally implausible story du jour happened to be about making salad for her mother and my mother throwing a temper tantrum over ice cream.

Grandma lives in a hospital where they serve her roasted porcupine and ice cream scoops of "crap they call potatoes", as well as 1/3 of a carrot at every meal. They cut the carrots into thirds because that way they can make three people suffer for the price of one.

She was in a surprisingly good mood, except for the fact that the box of chocolates we brought for her had no coconut flavoured ones.