Existentialism with Grandma

      When you tell yourself the story of your own life, there are undoubtedly moments to which you, in retrospect, ascribe a certain significance, because they make the rest of the plot make more sense. These moments become more brightly lit during the editing process of selective memory.    

     When I was about eight, some friends of the family were over and they were, I don’t know, moving something.  We were out on the driveway, and I guess I had gotten in the way, so the dad, who is this giant burly man, turns to me and says,

     
“Blah blah blah, KITTEN.”

   
  I was stunned.

    
“Kitten”.  No shit. He called me “kitten”.  I swooned.

 
   I was not a “kitten”y kid. Thanks to Dorothy Hamill, the woman who made my ugly polyester pants into ugly polyester shorts every other summer, and our family optician, Dr. Doisy, who did not intervene with “Hey, maybe matching eyeglasses are not the best way to say, ‘Dad, you’re my hero’”, I had a very un-kittenlike thing going.  My parents never said kitten-sweetie-honey stuff. They both had that Old Country, rationed butter and factory work demeanor.  My parents were “Move, damn it”-type people, and they wouldn’t have been any different if I had been the ACTUAL Hello Kitty.

     
Butter has never been hot commodity in my lifetime, so I feel more comfortable expressing affection in a casual and routine kind of way.  My own “Move, damn it” is tempered with parade toss-handfuls of “sweet pea” and “jellybean”.  Natasha and Gretchen, the family German Shepherds, became Zucchini Squash and Gherkin the Pickle Dog. My own cat, the suitably feral Beaner (show name: LolitaLula Bean Dean) became ‘Ner and then 'Nerbil, because I felt sorry for the oft-neglected second syllable. Jack has a million little nicknames, but they’re secret. Some of that stuff ya gotta keep secret … gotta keep it close.

     So there’s that.

    
With Jack around, my kitten-calling factor was unstoppable. Inevitably, “Grandma” was going to get replaced by something better. “The Gummer” just showed up one day like it was written on her birth certificate. Nothing was said about it, and “The Gummer” settled in. It was perfect.

 
 In late 2010, The Gummer suddenly asked, “Why the hell am I ‘The Gummer’?” 

   “Because it’s easier to say than Grandma.“

    I smiled like the cat who got the canary,  “… and because it makes you sound like you don’t have any teeth.”

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