Funny about Money

Yay!  The guy from the locksmith’s shop is on his way over — in plenty of time before I have to start this morning’s traipse to the Mayo, halfway to freakin’ Payson.

The doorknob on the front portal to the Funny Farm fell apart. The deadbolt is fine, but the handle set — a separate arrangement — is kaput. I replaced all the hardware for the house’s doors — interior and exterior — when I moved in here, so those gadgets have lasted 10 or 12 years. So…I figure that’s not bad mileage.

Couldn’t find a new lockset in the same brand, but did find one very similar in another brand, over at my favorite hardware store.

*****

And now our guy — a real sweetie, and cute to boot! — has installed the gadgetry, talked till we were both blue in the face, and taken off down the road. The new brand looks almost identical to the old set, except you can’t unlock the handle from the outside if you’ve locked it from the inside. Ducky. That means I can only use the deadbolt, as a practical matter.

But it doesn’t matter, because the impermeable steel security door has two heavy-duty locks, one of them a monster deadbolt. Unlikely any of the local prowlers will get in there, at least not before the noise wakes me up and I get out through a different hole in the wall.

What a place, and what times we live in, that you have to barricade yourself behind layers of metal doors and fierce locks.

Next, in another 15 minutes, it’s off to the Mayo — an hour’s drive to sit down with a doctor and listen to her tell me the results of this week’s mental function tests…which I can read for my dopey little self on the “Portal” page. Well…she can at least interpret how those results look in comparison with other women of my decrepitude.

The way I see it, the tests seem to say my memory and cognitive reasoning skills are mildly impaired. Whether that’s to a degree that’s unusual for an old bat my age, I do not know — that’s what I hope to extract from MayoDoc today.

It appears that they’ve foisted me off on one of their newer staff, by way of assigning a permanent primary care doctor. I hope so. I like this young doc: Indian, I’d say (India Indian, that is), judging from the name. She appears to be very smart, and she doesn’t act like she wishes she’d never had her line of sight blighted by my presence, as the present primary care doc does. Hope she hangs around!

*** *** ***

Meanwhile, an intriguing mystery has arisen.

I believe it’s remotely possible that my grandmother, who supposedly died of uterine cancer when my  mother was about 16 or 18 years old, actually did not die in 1929, in her 30s, but lived to be about 88. It appears she may have shuffled off this mortal coil along about 1979.

That would mean she was alive when her great-grandson was born, and she may even have been living when I finished the Ph.D.

And if that’s so, the best word for all that is weird!

My mother was the unexpected and illegitimate child of a young man who lived in upstate New York and a Bay Area woman who has been described to me as a flapper.

A great lawsuit ensued from the birth, and the New York relatives won: they got custody of my infant mother. So…she grew up on what she described as a “dirt farm” near Glens Falls, basically functioning as a household servant for the impoverished parents of her father…he who disappeared from the scene.

In middle age, the grandmother developed diabetes. This predated insulin as medication, and so before long the poor woman died a gruesome death. The grandfather, unable to care for a teenage girl, finally consented to send my mother to the California relatives, who lived in the Bay Area.

So now the poor kid gets deported from the sticks to the Big City.

Right about then, according to my mother’s tale, her mother Olive was…shall we say, somewhat “fast.” Apparently she chippied around with great élan, a quintessential flapper. The West Coast family were Christian Scientists, and the other members of the family were socially and morally quite conservative. It would appear that the issue with Olive was what used to be called nymphomania — a psychological pathology now called “hypersexuality.”

WhatEVER: apparently, if it had two legs, she would f*** it.

At this point — shortly after my mother takes up residence in California — Olive develops uterine cancer. A day late and a dollar short, she goes to an actual medical doctor, who (upon learning that she was an anti-science religious nut) tells her that if she’d come to his office three months earlier instead of trying to pray it away Christian-Science style, he could have saved her life. But as it was, there was nothing he could do for her and she was going to die.

Bullsh!t, of course…but the family didn’t know that: in the 1920s, nothing much was gonna help once symptoms of uterine cancer made themselves evident. Oh well…he stuck it to the religious nuts, eh?

Ohhhkayyyy….hang onto your hat: Now we arrive at the Holy Fuck Department.

Betake thyself here and get a gander of what it says about our dear grandmother Olive.

Folks, this is her. This is absolutely, positively her. And she does not die until 1979.

M’jito — her grandson — was born in 1977.

I have only one thing to say about this, and it is goddammit.

If any of what my mother told me was untrue, then clearly none of it is reliable. These are the possibilities:

1. They faked Olive’s death and lied to my mother about it.

2. They faked Olive’s death and my mother did know about it.

Corollary: my mother told me a passel of lies.

3. They faked Olive’s death but Olive died soon enough, so it didn’t much matter.

4. Olive faked her death, and none of the relatives ever thought to question it.

5. My mother knew the whole story and lied to me about it.

Okay. Let’s stare at this astonishing list…

D’you think my mother lied to me?

I think she was fully capable of doing so if she thought it was the moral thing to do. Or if her relatives told her to do so, on pain of excommunication from the family.

Is Olive still alive?

Unlikely: she’d be a zillion years old by now.

But…could she have been alive when her grandson, M’jito, was born?

Quite possibly. Longevity is in this family’s genes. But if she was still living, she only survived a few months after his (April) birth:

I guess all families have their secrets. But this one seems to me to take the fukkin’ cake!