Okay, so a warning in advance.\u00a0 This will qualify as a PG-13 blog.\u00a0 Or let\u2019s call it a Sunglasses and Turkey Gravy blog.\u00a0 When my sun glasses fell into the gravy pan on a Thanksgiving Day years ago, some very ungrandmotherly words escaped my lips.\u00a0 The grand kids were much younger then, but to this day, when it\u2019s time to make gravy, my son-in-law automatically clears the kitchen.<\/p>\n
So back to Mary Grandma.\u00a0 When I divorced my husband, I did not divorce my mother-in-law, Mary Janc.\u00a0 She was a beautiful woman but she had a challenging life.\u00a0 Her parents divorced when she was very young\u2014six or seven or so.\u00a0 She and her mother boarded a train and moved from New Jersey to Arizona.\u00a0 I met Mary Grandma\u2019s father once.\u00a0 He was a gruff old guy who had never learned to read and who lived in the neighborhood he grew up in because he couldn\u2019t read the street or highway signs.<\/p>\n
By the time Mary Grandma was 16, she was a married woman with a child on the way.\u00a0 My father-in-law, Herman, always liked to tell the story of how the first time she made black-eyed peas, she cooked so many that they had to fill up every pot in the house.\u00a0 When he went away to the Pacific during World War II, she was left to raise her kids on her own for a while, and I suspect from things I heard along the way that during the time he was gone, she may not have always stuck to the straight and narrow.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t meet her until 1963 when I started dating my first husband.\u00a0 She was always snazzily dressed with her hair and makeup in perfect order.\u00a0 And although her Thanksgiving turkey dressing is amazing, she was not the very best cook.\u00a0 She always boiled corn on the cob for a minimum of fifteen minutes.\u00a0 Yum!\u00a0 Other than overcooked corn, however, we got along just fine.<\/p>\n
When I graduated from college in 1966, Herman and Mary were living in Las Vegas, and I was engaged to their son.\u00a0 He was an iron worker at the Nevada Test Site where his father also worked.\u00a0 So that summer, after school got out, I went to Vegas and ended up getting a job as a secretary\/receptionist at a small construction company.\u00a0 Toward the end of that first week, my boss told me that \u201cthe big boss\u201d was coming in from Oregon for a meeting with people from Bullhead City, and he needed someone to go along to take notes.\u00a0 Would I fill the bill?<\/p>\n
For the record, I was twenty-one at the time.\u00a0 I was a six-foot tall blonde, with blue eyes.\u00a0 I weighed 132 pounds and had 23 inch waist.\u00a0 Do you see where this is going?\u00a0 Maybe you do, but I didn\u2019t\u2014not back then.\u00a0 So I said sure.\u00a0 I went home and and told Mary Grandma was was up.\u00a0 To her credit, she did not roll her eyes.\u00a0 She did not say \u201cWHAT WERE YOU THINKING?\u201d\u00a0 Nope, she treated me like an adult and let me go.<\/p>\n
Pretty soon The Big Boss showed up in his rented Cadillac and off we went.\u00a0 As we drove, he told me that the people from Bullhead City were going to meet us in Searchlight which is right around sixty-miles from Las Vegas.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t been to Searchlight in years, and I know it\u2019s changed remarkably since then, but at the time, it consisted of two run-down one story casinos, a couple of equally rundown motels, a gas station, and maybe a grocery store.\u00a0 TBB pulled into the parking lot of the first casino and told me this is the place we were supposed to meet the Bullhead City guys.<\/p>\n
Inside, he hauled out a wallet loaded with hundred dollar bills, laid one of them on the bar, and ordered himself a Chivas.\u00a0 \u201cWhat\u2019ll you have?\u201d he asked me.\u00a0 I had barely made it past the legal drinking age, so my drinking vocabulary was somewhat limited.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019ll have a screwdriver,\u201d I told him.\u00a0 That was the one drink I knew.<\/p>\n
By the time we finished our first drink, I was starting to wonder about our supposed meeting.\u00a0 TBB ordered a second round before excusing himself to \u201cgo check,\u201d I\u2019d had a nodding acquaintance with a few bartenders at some of the sketchy dives where Jerry Janc liked to hang out, and I figured I needed a friend, so when the bartender delivered the second round, I asked him, \u201cWho\u2019s going to give out first, him or me?\u201d\u00a0 The bartender gave me a puzzled look. \u201cIsn\u2019t that guy your husband?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cNo,\u201d I told him, \u201che\u2019s my boss.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cGot you covered, lady,\u201d the bartender said.\u00a0 \u201cDon\u2019t you worry about a thing.\u201d\u00a0 He dumped out my screwdriver and came back with straight orange juice.<\/p>\n
For the next long while, TBB continued to pay for \u201cdouble\u201d screwdrivers while I drank straight OJ and he drank straight Chivas.\u00a0 At one point he allowed as how I could really hold my liquor.\u00a0 I told him it was a case of mind over matter.\u00a0 I had come to work, and there was no way I was going to get drunk.\u00a0 At some point, he allowed as how the place was dead and maybe we should give the other casino a try.\u00a0\u00a0 Having had exactly one screwdriver and lots of orange juice, I figured I could handle one more real drink, but that didn\u2019t happen.\u00a0 The first bartender called the second bartender, and my first \u201cdouble screwdriver\u201d was straight orange juice.<\/p>\n
Finally TBB determined that the guys from Bullhead weren\u2019t coming and maybe we should get some sleep.\u00a0 We moseyed across the street to a motel and he went into the office to rent the \u201crooms.\u201d\u00a0 Of course when he opened the door to let me in to the one that was supposedly mine, he conveniently kept the key.\u00a0 Go figure!\u00a0 So I looked at the room, I looked at the bed, and I thought about how far it was to get back to Vegas on my own.\u00a0 It was the wee hours of the morning by then.\u00a0 I needed to get some sleep, but there was no way I was going to climb into that bed.<\/p>\n
So what did I do?\u00a0 I did a complete Doris Day routine.\u00a0 I gathered all the covers and pillows off the bed, locked myself in the bathroom, made a reasonably comfortable bed in the tub, and actually fell asleep for a little while.\u00a0 Eventually he turned up.\u00a0 He banged on the bathroom door a time or two, but by then he had had WAY too much Chivas.\u00a0 A few minutes later, I heard him snoring.\u00a0 At that point, I crept out of the room and went back across the street to the first casino.\u00a0 For the next hour or two, I drank coffee with both bartenders\u2014the second one had gotten off work by then.\u00a0 At five-o\u2019clock in the morning, they flagged down a Greyhound bus that took me back to Vegas.\u00a0 The driver dropped me off in front of the Showboat, leaving me about three blocks to walk back to the house.<\/p>\n
When I came into the family room through the back door, Mary Grandma was sitting in her customary place\u2014a decrepit leather recliner\u2014smoking up a storm.\u00a0 When I walked in, she didn\u2019t even turn her head.\u00a0 \u201cDid you roll him?\u201d she asked.\u00a0 \u201cNo,\u201d I told her, but thinking about all those hundred dollar bills, I added, \u201cI probably should have.\u201d<\/p>\n
Do I know how stupid that was?\u00a0 Yes, I do.\u00a0 Do I know how lucky I am that I didn\u2019t end up as a skeleton rotting away in the desert?\u00a0 Yes, I do.\u00a0 Would I raise hell with my granddaughters if they tried to pull such a boneheaded stunt?\u00a0 Probably.\u00a0 But Mary Grandma didn\u2019t do that.\u00a0 She gave me permission to make a mistake and figure out a way to get out of it.\u00a0 And I think that may have been one of the things that set us on the right path for being mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.<\/p>\n
So why am I writing this today, on September 11?\u00a0 This morning we watched the 9-11 Memorial Service in Shanksville, dedicated to the forty passengers who died on Flight 93.\u00a0 And when I heard the words \u201cLet\u2019s roll,\u201d they gave me goosebumps the same way they did seventeen years ago when I first heard them.<\/p>\n
But here\u2019s the deal.\u00a0 My mind is full of cotton, hay, and rags, and sometimes it comes up with the most astonishing and occasionally even inappropriate juxtapositions.\u00a0 And before long I was thinking about Mary Grandma, sitting there in her cloud of cigarette smoke and asking me, \u201cDid you roll him?\u201d<\/p>\n
Hat\u2019s off to you Mary Grandma.\u00a0 On this very sad day, remembering you made me smile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Okay, so a warning in advance.\u00a0 This will qualify as a PG-13 blog.\u00a0 Or let\u2019s call it a Sunglasses and Turkey Gravy blog.\u00a0 When my sun glasses fell into the gravy pan on a Thanksgiving Day years ago, some very ungrandmotherly words escaped my lips.\u00a0 The grand kids were much younger then, but to this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-qW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1670"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1671,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1670\/revisions\/1671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}