Gramcrackers

Back in L.A. Back in the land of NOW. Back to the landscape of flatscreens in bars with Olympics on them late into the night, to the corner of the key lime pie colored room that means for me INTERNET INTERNET INTERNET!! I can't drink it in fast enough! Must...slake...my thirst!!!

I've been in San Diego at Grandma's. Frequent occurrence of late, I know. She's 97 and blind and living alone because she's so derned independent, she'd rather totter around on fossil-frail legs in a macular degenerated fog than give up her digs. She's also waiting for the welcome from the part of the family that will take her in when her bones won't hold her up anymore [Cue hold music] ... Considering those bones are creeping up on a century that should be any minute now [More hold music]...

...Okay, we're just going to let that line hold while we continue with the rest of the program. So, Grandma has lived in the same retirement village for 31 years. I remember the night she and Grandpa moved in. It was rainy. I was 6. And tired. I remember sitting on the couch that had just been set down. 31 years later, I am prone to napping on the "couch" that has replaced it, this one short enough that my legs hang off of it (you shrink when you get to be 97--couch is Grandma-sized).

Since Grams is blind and has been getting that way for years, there is no internet connection. Her last memory of modern data entry is of the Word Processor. So I explain the internet by saying it's like magazine pages inside a Word Processor. And you can send the pages as if they were themselves on a phone call, and the receiving phone is another "Word Processor" where the message you wrote or the page you sent pops up. And you can "sift" through the many millions of pages stored on the "phone lines" like you can flip through a phone book, looking at all the ads...but the pages are glossy and pretty like magazine pages. ...How she translates the tactile experiences of paper, ink, heavy dial-phones, and the sounds that go with them, to a purely intellectual chain of events, I long to see what this looks like in her imagination.

Point is, at Grandma's there is no internet. And I no longer have my Blackberry from my office job. So I am completely without access to any brief little hop to the outside world and I consider claustrophobia, for, oh, let's say just a few moments, because it's sweltering hot in the empty bedroom, can't go in there, and the T.V. is blaring in the tiny living room--did I mention her hearing ain't what it used to be? I SAID, DID I MENTION HER HEARING AIN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE?? And it's nighttime, to which my Grandma is allergic, and she can smell it on me and immediately begin choking and wheezing in a feverish contact high, so God Forbid I Go Outside Where the Criminals and Rapists wait just outside the door.

It's near 8:30, though. Bedtime for Grandma. And I wait to pounce on the T.V. to find the Olympics. Grand display of amazing feats are on for two weeks, inspiring and heartwrenching stories unfolding in time-delayed real time. In a country far far away. THAT will take me farther than even the 6 o'clock news and I can fantasize about being connected to the outside world late into the night. Grandma has said she doesn't get that channel but I don't believe her. How can you not get the Olympics? Why, that's unamerican, and Grandma is most certainly card-carrying.

She doesn't get that channel. Criminy! Now SHE's in the tiny bedroom, sweltering or not, the place is locked down like Fort Knox, and I am sitting in Grandma's chair, not one foot away from the television (placed there so she can "see" it and hear it) and I am devolving into the caverns of my mind, collapsing in on itself. ... ... ... I realize that this is what Grandma does every day. ... ...

I get up and make a freezer waffle and eat four Oreo's when that is not enough. It takes me all of ten minutes from start to finish. It takes Grandma ten minutes to get the waffles from the freezer into the toaster (but she'd sooner bury me than not make breakfast for me, so she starts early). I turn off the T.V. and work on my play...thanking God I have the faculties to at least map this manic imagination, or distract it, in the absence of internet and the Olympics.