Inventing Grandmother (standard:drama, 2082 words)
Author: BENTLINK	Added: Dec 20 2004	Views/Reads: 3659/2476	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Almost anything is possible if you want it enough.

Inventing Grandmother 

Bobbie's grandma gathered him into the circle of her arms and hugged him
to her as if he were the most precious thing in her world.  For the 
whole of the school year she had been there just like this, in her pink 
or yellow apron waiting each afternoon for Bobbie to step down from the 
bus. I could only guess at the warmth of her arms and big chest, at how 
it would feel to be encircled with love like that, at how wonderful it 
would be to have someone that cared enough about you to come, rain or 
shine and wait for your arrival. 

Bobbie would sometimes share homemade cookies and cake from his lunch
with me.  As we sat chewing away at the morsels of moist, sweet ginger 
bread Bobbie told me she let him help her bake the cakes and cookies 
while she told him about her childhood.  She told him stories about the 
little farm where she grew up. Stories about animals and how they 
behaved and about how she had done her daily chores.  She told him 
about feeding broken up corn to the very same chickens and ducks that 
she had seen hatched from eggs.  She had even made helping her older 
sister with washing the after supper dishes sound like fun. Bobbie 
repeated her stories about stepping over little green snakes to pick 
blackberries and about making jelly from the berries juice, about 
milking the cow and squirting milk from the cow's thing half way across 
the old barn into an old yellow and black cat's mouth. 

All this dumb farm stuff had come as news to me for I had never been on
a farm or seen a cow except on TV and until Bobbie had explained how 
milk got out of the cow had no idea about any of this. I had listened 
with partially open mouth while Bobbie talked about the things the 
little old lady had done. Last summer Bobbie had helped her plant a 
small garden and then cooked the baby carrots and green peas they grew 
there. I don't even like peas but they sure sounded good when he talked 
about growing and cooking them with his granny. 

Near the end of the school year I was feeling lonesome and decided I
needed my own Grandma to spend the summer with.  I was tired of going 
home every day to the same old empty apartment and fixing my own 
supper, a T V dinner.  Bored with just doing my home work and watching 
TV and going to bed all alone every night.  My Grandmother would be 
bigger and stronger than Bobbies, she would not limp when she walked 
and would be real smart. I started talking to the Granny I wanted way 
before I could see her. Telling her things like how lonesome I felt and 
how much I would like to have my own grandma.  I would talk about 
school and what I had for lunch, mostly the baloney and cheese sandwich 
that dad fixed late at night and left with milk money in a brown paper 
bag on the kitchen counter. 

I think I started seeing her a little bit after about a week of talking
to myself and feeling real dumb.  The night I first saw her I had 
talked louder and longer than usual even after I got into bed and when 
I got to the part about Bobbie's carrot cake I started seeing her in 
one corner of my bedroom.    At first she would only let me see her if 
I lay unmoving after I got in bed and even then only out of the corner 
of my eye.  She started out being so pale I thought at first she might 
be just my imagination.  I just kept hoping and talking and soon I 
could see her better but still so pale I could see the street light 
right through her if she passed in front of one of my windows.  She was 
pretty short for a grown up lady and a little fat too. 

I did all the talking for a long time but when I started running out of
things to say and ask her about were she grew up and her name and stuff 
like that she would give me whispered one-word answers. This getting 
and then learning about your own grandmother turned out to be a lot 
harder, slower and way more work than I thought it would be. 

After talking and asking questions almost nonstop for another week or
two I still only knew a little about her. She had grown up in Kentucky, 
just like my mother who died.  When I ask her name she said "Mary" but 
she seemed to like it better when I called her grandma. 

She first spoke more than one word when I told her my mother had died
and she said, "Yes honey I know and I'm real sorry"!  I got real 
embarrassed cause I cried a little bit when she said that.   After she 
saw my tears she started to stand closer to me and got a lot easier to 
see and hear. 


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