OLD PEOPLE

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 When I was a kid I totally didn't like/understand old people, mainly my grandparents. I had been forced into the Boy Scouts and when we went to nursing homes it fucking stank like pee. That bummed me out. My mother's mother had this illness also. She hung herself when my mother was 13. Her husband married another woman who I grew up with as my grandmother. She was named Janet and she was legally blind. On top of that she had a fucking hair lip so there was no understanding anything she said. My father's mother, during The Depression gave birth to twins and then had my father and had a second set of twins 9 months later. So in 3 years she had 5 kids during The Depression. Like kind of intense. She was married to this guy that I didn't know. My father's father.

When I was 5 or 7 around there, this homeless guy with a broken arm like a cast on his arm moved into our house for a couple weeks. He and my father drank together all the time until one night my father threw him out and I never saw him again. Years later at some wake I learned he was our grandfather. Isn't that wild? I totally thought he was some homeless guy. I also made a joke at the wake about adoption and I found out later that one of our cousins had been adopted. You would think they would have told us that. 

So I hate old people. I can't help it. 

I forgot to mention my grandmother on my father's side, an Irish woman Nelly had an Irish brogue and nobody could understand her on the phone at all. I dreaded any time she called. The only thing we all said that we understood her saying was, "Stop saying 'What'" The other great thing about Nelly is that when my godfather was a teenager, this is one of her kids, he was in the kitchen eating candy he throws the wrapper in the trash and she goes, "I just emptied that."