July 29, 2009

  • antics of a gma

    i live on the third floor of a family home.  the brazilian family lives on the second floor and grandma lives on the bottom floor.  i call this post "the antics" because she is a really particular woman.  even though her son owns the building, i think she really wears the pants in this family.  so in no particular order, this is why i find this grandma so interesting.

    she has a beautiful garden which she arduously attends to.  she's the only person i've ever seen who shoos away sparrows...with a broom.  it's funny because i can see the garden from my patio, and while i'm enjoying this idyllic scene, a bird will land and i will see a broom or a hand shoo the bird right out of the picture.  once, when i was leaving the house, i noticed that she was hunched over her flowers, moving with very slow tai-chi-like movements.  then out of nowhere, i would hear this awful zapping sound - but no movements from either the grandma or anything in the immediate vicinity.  i finally caught of glimpse of what she had in her hand...a zapping net.  i've never seen one of these before, but it's literally a battery-powered, racquet-shaped wand used to zap bugs.  so she was actually zapping the bugs in the garden.  this always makes me chuckle because apparently a beautiful garden has nothing to do with birds and bees for grandma...only beautiful flowers.

    when i first moved in, i found out that grandma doesn't speak any english - or so i thought.  after a month of fumbling awkward hello's and goodbye's, i finally downloaded a portuguese translator onto my iPod so i could find out how to say "ola."  one time, when i was coming back, i saw her sitting on her bench and said "ola" and she said something long and complicated in portuguese.  upon coming closer, she realized that i was not a portuguese-speaker, and in brilliant english, she said, "o!  sorry!  i thought you were my son!"  the english teacher in me broke that one down...past tense, double construction, exclamations.  this would put her in my advanced esl class...so i guess it's not so much that she can't speak english as it is that she doesn't want to speak english.

    finally, i sometimes wonder if this grandma ever sleeps.  i came home pretty late the other night, and almost screamed when i noticed a figure sitting on the dark under the stairs.  it was grandma.  i don't know if she saw that i saw her, so i pretended i didn't, and snuck up the stairs.  the next morning, at the crack of dawn, she was out in the garden zapping those bugs again.  i know because the sun came into my room, and i had to close the shades before crawling back to bed.  yes, this is one unique grandma...