By Beauty Damned

Old Koots (Sentimental)

Sandy wrote a post today that cracked me the hell up. That girl can tell a story like no one else. It got me thinking of old people. How comical they can be. How most of us, if we're lucky, will be really old one day and if we're even luckier than that, we'll be funny and entertaining to be around, even if we don't know it. Not just crotchety and decrepit, but crotchety and decrepit and worth remembering. I think getting really old gives you a license to be kooky. I mean if you're 85, by all means, wear the brightest, craziest outfit you can find. You might as well stand out rather than fade into the crowd.

I never ever did get to go to any of the stores I wanted to that day. They had other plans, like staying in Sears for 3 freakin’ hours. I was put on Pocket-Book Patrol by the Dressing Rooms and I had the pleasure of sitting…sitting….and yes more sitting while they tried on every single color elastic polyester pants came in. Once in a while they’d show me an outfit that they thought I’d look “cute” in. It was hard trying to come up with new ways of saying.."I wouldn’t be caught dead in that outfit".

My grandpa got really funny the older he got, but he didn't have a clue. I guess that's what made him funny. He had his own brand of personal style. My favorite memory of my grandfather is of a time when some friends and I were sitting outside at a coffee shop near my house. My friends had a running thing where they teased me about my grandpa, pointing to any old person passing by and saying "is that your grandpa?" (you know how stupid teenagers are). Of course I would say "no, shut up already" while flipping my vidal sassoon mullet out of my eyes.

But then here came Jimmy, down the street, wearing a dark suit and tie like he wore every day of his life for as long as I knew him, and he wore his hideous "russian" hat on his head that my brother and I always referred to as "the stinky brown hat." The material was like thick carpet. Anyway, he was carrying his "satchel" (that's what grandpa called it - another thing that would make Josh and I break out into hysterics), which was actually a brown leather briefcase. So I sat there with my friends and as he walked by they nudged me once again and said "is that your grandpa?" I felt defensive almost as I looked at how put together and purposeful he was. I said "yes that's my grandpa." At the same time that it is a hilarious moment when I look back at it, it was also meaningful, because I remember it now when I remember him and in that memory I have the most perfect snapshot of him exactly the way he was. A quirky old man carrying around some of his most valued worldly possessions in that satchel. (Namely, his newspaper and his pocketbook).

My grandpa also drove me nuts briefly when I was a teen (or maybe it was vice versa). He came to stay with us when we first moved to Oregon. My dad was studying for the Oregon bar exam, so he wasn't around much and my mom was off working at a law firm in San Francisco because we were poor. My grandpa was the only one there a lot of the time and my brother and I figured he was too old and deaf to know what we were up to. Bad children. He was sleeping on the couch when the police brought me home for being out past town curfew. My brother greeted me and shooed me up the stairs past grandpa so he wouldn't wake up and wonder what the hell was going on. Upstairs my brother was having a virtual fiesta with a bunch of friends over. Grandpa just stayed there fast asleep. But you know, when my parents returned, grandpa Jimmy gave detailed accounts of that night, and all of me and my brother's bad behavior while they were away. No matter how old and absent he seemed, he was sharp as a tack for a long time. Until the last few years when he was more than a little lost.

He also taught me how to play chess and tried in vain to teach me how to read the stock market. And he was always happy to give me a couple dollars, as long as I was willing to try and ask him in spanish as he'd often demand that I do. That old geez' lived to be 93. (And now that he's gone, I miss him).

We should all be so lucky. To live to 93 and be missed.

Posted by Maria at November 29, 2004 07:26 PM