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Questionable Grandparenting
When a visit to Granny’s house is more like Vegas than Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood…
My parents are the most normal people ever. They are squares, pedestrian, vanilla, Switzerland-like people. The same cannot be said for my grandmother. Nope, my Memere, which is French-Canadian for Granny, was a real pistol of a person.
Ole Memere had a lot of quirks about her besides just speaking Fren-glish. She drank Ancient Age whiskey by the fifth, smoked like a dirty chimney, said what she thought with no filter, and wasn’t afraid introduce young me to a variety of completely inappropriate experiences and topics.
Being babysat at Memere’s was the five-year-old’s equivalent to a night on the Vegas Strip. While my parents went out to dinner, my sister and I got to live on the wild side for an evening. Memere would feed us plates of spaghetti bigger then our heads and then for dessert show us how to flip crepes with our bare hands. Playing with hot pans was something mom never let us do. It was great fun to see who could get the crepe flipped over without obtaining third-degree burns.
After dinner Memere was known to give lessons in anything from poker to blackjack. We did a lot of gambling before we reached double-digit ages. Cards were shuffled, chips passed, and the games began. There were no handicaps for young ages, it was every man…
