Just before I started high school, my parents split up.  Shortly after that, my maternal grandmother came to live with us.  She was a garrulous, chatty woman who would talk about anything to anyone—which my more reserved mother told me had often caused her excruciating embarrassment, especially as a teenager.
 
Granny quickly made herself useful in our household, cooking a hot breakfast for my brother and me every morning (a great novelty in our minimal-effort cold-cereal world). She also kept our house tidier and more normal-looking than we had ever seen it before, except after the cleaning lady came.
 
Granny had also reached an age where she realized she could say and do pretty much whatever she wanted—and she took full advantage of those liberties.  When she was handed a Christmas present, she’d typically moan “Lord, more crap to hide.”  As she brought me my breakfast on the morning after a date, she’d say, “Well, did you get fresh with her?  Did you give her little titty a squeeze, hmm?”

She wasn’t the brightest member of our family, and I sometimes got annoyed with her—especially when she’d say (usually in a disapproving tone) “You’re just like your grandfather!.”  I felt I was me, not just a copy of someone else.  Also, my grandfather had died when I was three, and I had only a couple of very dim memories of him—one of them being that he got a lot of laughs out of popping out his false teeth to scare the bejeebers out of me.  How could I defend myself against “charges” that weren’t specific enough to refute?

Still, I realized later in life that while my grandmother didn’t have the highest IQ in our family, she had a substantial amount of wisdom in her.

And she’d had a colorfully interesting life.  Born on a small farm in a dreary backwater of Pennsylvania, she’d had the pluck to move to New York City and build herself an off-and-on career on the Broadway stage, which included being a model in the famous Ziegfeld Follies.

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