Optimize my Grandma
Every day I’m told how to live better, sleep deeper, and eat differently. My great-grandma made it to 95 with barely any instructions.
Nobody ever told her a life hack. She didn’t know that the first drink of the day should not be coffee. I’m confident she never counted a step: “7,000 are required to cut heart disease by 30%.” She never switched to almond butter because technically peanut butter is a legume, which means it will slowly detonate your spleen.
When I think about her, there are a few things that stand out. She was married to a man named Raymond. I don’t know how they met. The standards for swiping right back then were living on the same street and whether the man could raise a barn. I’ve seen old pictures of Poppa Ray, as we called him. He didn’t look like much of a barn raiser, but it’s hard to spot muscles under long-sleeved button-ups—the only attire of the time. His brown slacks appeared to have a weight to them, so I’m sure his squat numbers were respectable.
I hope they were in love, though I remember my mom saying Poppa Ray wasn’t that nice to her. I can’t speculate what that meant. Perhaps he was rather cold, or perhaps he never took her to Chili’s on its grand opening. I’m not here to sully the man’s name, it’s not the point, what I’m saying is she lasted a long time.
Her house was filled with cuckoo clocks, and she’d watch daytime tabloid TV, then recount the insights she learned back to us. I can recall her telling the neighbor’s daughter not to marry a man who checks your underpants. It wasn’t sound logic, but she spoke. Isn’t that enough to suggest she cared? She owned a housecoat that she wore all year round. It had a quilted pattern and mustard color that thrived during sloppy barbecues.
Let’s walk through her normal day, in terms of information load. She’d awake to the coordinated blare of thirty-seven cuckoos manufactured in the Black Forest region of Germany. Maybe there would be a newspaper in her house, assuming old Ray allowed such progressive behavior as literacy.
When the husbands went off to work, she might have phoned another housewife, to collectively fantasize about what the interior of Chili’s was like. She probably sat on the porch to peel potatoes and work on a pie of unusual fruit origin. Rhubarb or some other vaguely vegetable root plant. Parsnip loaf with sprig of bland. All in, maybe she encountered five to ten messages.
My morning begins with the vibration of my phone, synced to my watch. I slap at the off button on both screens. Eventually one registers, usually the snooze, meaning the whole exercise will occur again in about eight minutes. From there, I scroll through my phone with shame. Making rounds between email, social media, and package deliveries.
As I make my coffee, I’ll watch a YouTube short—or three. I try to skip the ad by closing the app. Some days it works and I feel like I’ve stolen something. A similar cycle continues throughout the day, to a total approaching the thousands. If I had to guess, probably a level that could give the peanut a real run for rupturing spleens.
She made it to 95 and survived Poppa Ray. I’m still deciding about the efficacy of cold showers and safest non-legume spread.
See you soon,
—Ricky C.