You’d Bitch if You Were Hung with a New Rope!

Sayings of a decidedly non-traditional grandmother

I had the great good fortune to grow up with a crowd of grandparents and they were characters. I’ve written about them before and will again. There’s a lot of material in there.

Because my biological father had skedaddled before we had a chance to be properly introduced my “other” grandmother was Grama Remington, my stepfather’s mother. She was a sweet and dear little old lady with only one eye who baked amazing bread and always had chocolate for us. At some point, maybe by the time I hit eleven or so, I felt a little weird about the way she always went out of her way to have nice things for us. Did she think we wouldn’t like her if she didn’t buy the big bags of Hershey’s Miniatures?

My mom’s mother, Gramudder, could not have cared less if we liked her or not

As I’ve noted before, if there had been reliable birth control available in 1958, I probably wouldn’t be here typing this story. It’s safe to extrapolate that if birth control pills had been around in 1932, my mother wouldn’t have been around, either. These were two women who simply didn’t seem to like kids and really never should have been forced to bear them.

And, yet, I learned a lot from both and count myself lucky today that they were my family.

Gramudder smoked like a chimney, but then all the grown-ups did in those days. She could hold her own drinking as well. She was a fiend at the card table. There was a game they played with two decks of cards that was called Spikes and Mallets but that got bastardized, tellingly, into Spite and Malice. That’s my Gramudder.

That side of the family was from western Pennsylvania, near the border with western New York State. It was oil country where many of the big fields had been played out but where those massive pumps that looked like enormous grasshoppers rocked back and forth sounding like heartbeats. It was a somewhat impoverished part of the country and everyone was related by blood or marriage.

Rixford, Pennsylvania. Population 572. Until I was 15 years old, Daddy would load the station wagon and drive off with the wife and four daughters into the worst weather of the year on some of the scariest roads in the country to make sure we spent Christmas “at home”. The great diaspora of Scalfaro/Dibbles would converge on Rixford every Christmas where the adults would drink and yell at the kids and the kids would keep doing all the things that got the yelling started in the first place. Ahhhh, family.

Things my Gramudder said

“You’d bitch if you were hung with a new rope!” This was in response to any complaint for any reason, large or small. I knew better than to pipe up with anything cute, but yeah Gramudder I would bitch if I were hung with a new rope or an old rope or a length of clothesline and so would you.

“Wish in one hand and shit in the other, see which gets full first.” I have to admit that I would actually ask for things I knew I wouldn’t get just to hear that one. It had a second verse: “If horse turds were biscuits, we’d all have a bite”. Go, Gramudder!

“Touch that and I’ll break your arm.”

Yeah, that last one wasn’t a saying. She said that once when I was about six years old and reaching up to the counter where she was working. And she wasn’t kidding. My arm hurt for the rest of the day.

Things my Gramudder did

She never slept upstairs with Bompy (whose name I coined when I was two and couldn’t pronounce Grampa; he remained Bompy to everyone for the rest of his life). Gramudder slept on the couch. Every single night for as long as I ever remember. She said it was because Bompy thrashed around and kept her awake. She said that was from him sleeping in bunks in the oil fields during his years running one of the big Caterpillars clearing new fields.

She said a lot of things.

We’ll never know which of them were the truth but I have my theories about why they slept apart all those years.

The woman read voraciously. From her perch on the couch under her afghan, she was surrounded by bookcases. In addition to the ones crammed onto the shelves, there were stacks of them everywhere. It should have been a paradise to a bookworm like me except for one small drawback. Every book on those shelves, in my memory, was a paperback Harlequin romance. Every single book.

During our summer visits, I would be desperate enough that I’d actually read those dreadful things. In short order, I figured out the formula and got to the point that I just couldn’t.

Gramudder would sometimes wander from room to room looking for her glasses that were hanging around her neck. But she wasn’t senile. The woman was sharp as broken glass to the end of her life. When the rest of the family was losing their minds because Bompy’s father, Grampa Nick, went off and remarried at the age of 98 without telling anyone, Gramudder shrugged it off.

Family

Maybe our family was like other families in that blood is thicker than water stuff but I never got that. I drifted away into my years of drug abuse and alcoholism. When I should have been making sure what happened to me didn’t happen to my sisters, I didn’t. I wasn’t around when Gramudder died. I didn’t go to her funeral or to Bompy’s.

When I finally emerged and came to my senses, my sisters and other family members weren’t having it. As well they shouldn’t.

But who I am and how I respond to life and what I do bring to the table now are all grounded in having been raised by two of the toughest, most unrelenting, strongest, and rock-solid women I ever knew. Once my mother told me that I got my balls from her. It was a bonding moment.

There are no perfect families but I feel like mine was perfect for me.

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