Happy Birthday...

...to my grandmother, Trudie, who turns 82 today. She's probably going to throw a fit that I posted her age, but hopefully I can appease her with a handmade Teddy bear or three.

Trudie, whose real name is Grammy, got her nickname during the springtime of my three-year passionate affair with one Gordon Matthew Sumner, known to the rest of the world as Sting, although my fellow fanatics and I can tell you exactly when and where he was born, and what his dad did for a living. (October 2, 1951, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England; Dad was a milkman.) So distraught was I that Sting had bequeathed the bulk of his affections to Trudie Styler, the actress/Tantric chick who would become his legal wife when I was sixteen that I thus nicknamed Grammy Gertrude. The name stuck, and now we all call her Trudie. (Hey, it's prettier than Gert, for heavens' sake.)

Because Trudie lives on the other side of PA (the western side--Harrisburg is located in what local newscasters like to refer to as "the Midstate," a term that drives my dad batshit due to its woeful innacuracy), I always thought of her as my "other grandmother"--the one who didn't live a mile away and didn't tell me to sit up straight, stop eating so much, and act like a little lady. Oh, she might have tried, but Trudie has always been the slop-over-with-sugar type of grandmother, and so any attempts to establish authority fell by the wayside as soon as I said "no" and started screaming. Not that she isn't a tough broad in her own right. Trudie worked as a Rosie the Riveter during WWII (one of the loveliest conversations I ever had with her was one in which I discovered she'd longed to go to college and become a metallurgist), raised three law-abiding, basically sane kids on no money and a lot of canned food, and, after my grandpap Bud died, traveled to Italy, France, Egypt, and Israel on a host of, as I put it, "old Catholic lady pilgrimages." I have a picture of her someplace with her friends in Italy, and they're all grabbing at the Pope like he's Bono. As if this weren't enough, Trudie hasn't been able to eat solid food since 1998, and within the confines of the feeding tube she's stuck on, she still gets out there and does her thing. I think we've managed to convinced her to let her nephews change the lightbulbs in her kitchen ceiling, but other than that, Trudie does what she wants, god love her.

The thing that I loved most about Trudie when I was a kid was that she could sew. Oh, Gloria could knit and crochet and hem, but Trudie was an alchemist when it came to a sewing machine. For my fifth birthday, she made me the dance costume I'd been harassing my mom to buy me for over a year. The pattern included a clown hat--I seem to recall a minor skirmish when I didn't want to wear the hat when I went trick-or-treating. (Parents, listen up: Many, many kids eye clowns askance. They are scary men who paint their faces and pull phallic objects out of their baggy pants. Do not hire a clown for your kid's fifth birthday party under the assumption that she or he will find it funny. Remember John Wayne Gacy? All right. Thus concludeth the PSA.) For Christmas when I was seven, during the height of the Cabbage Patch Kid plague, Trudie made me one when my dad's tireless efforts to score one of those freakish mutants proved fruitless. She went on to buy me like, ten more, long after I'd outgrown them and the plague had diminished to a small, nagging infection that one learns to live with.

I'm pretty disgusted with the way I treated poor Trudie during my teenage years. Nasty doesn't cut it. Bitch barely scratches the surface. No, I was the dreaded "C" word when it came to my grandmother, but she mostly put up with it without ever once suggesting I should be smacked upside the head or transferred to a mental hospital, which is more than I can say for many of the women of my acquaintance during those years in Jesusland, none of whom bore even a fraction of the brunt of my rotten gittishness. Trudie, this is a paltry offering, but I am very sorry for telling you to get the fuck out of my room that time you were visiting Dad and me and I was watching that videotape of my high school's production of Hello, Dolly! This is not an excuse, but the reason I was so horrified that you walked into my room without knocking, besides the fact that I was a rotten adolescent desperate for privacy, was that I had a huge girl crush on the girl who played Dolly, and I didn't know how to articulate that, even though girl crushes are completely de rigeur and even if it were a full-blown, ride-the-pink-glitter-pony type of crush, I doubt you would have cared. Thank you for saying nothing more or less than "I don't know how to please you, Karla," in response, because if you had just yelled at me, I don't think it would have had the impact that it did. And thank you for never once suggesting I should go to church or to a mental hospital to cure my uncontrollable mood swings, even though you are a devout Catholic and you were well within your rights to do so. And please stop trying to change lightbulbs on your own, lest you fall off that ladder again.

Trudie and I are more than cool now. I've stopped being a cunt to her, and she makes a valiant effort to not call me "Precious" or talk to me like I'm five too much. I actually quite enjoy hanging out with her independent of my dad when we go out to see her on major holidays, like when we drop a few bucks at evil Wal-Mart on yarn and beading supplies. My only request to her besides not talking to me like I'm five is to please stop hovering when I make the Durkee's onion and green bean casserole for dinner. She complies about half the time, but she often forgets. Hey, she's 82--I'll give her a break.

So, Trudie, be good to yourself this year. Thanks for putting up with me. I'm going to stop now before we get into Hallmark card territory, because that just won't do. Love you!