Great-Grandma couldn’t stand Ted Kennedy, or any of the Kennedy family for that matter.
Happy birthday to my great-grandma, who would have been 114 today, if she hadn’t died in 1992 at the age of 94. I miss Grandma. She was cool. I would give almost anything for just one more afternoon of coffee and conversation with her, but you get what you get. I’m just glad that she lived close and I was able to spend as much time with her as I did. Besides having a taste for insanely strong coffee and for discussing conservative politics, she had a collection of tabloids that would boggle the mind. She always claimed to read them for the entertainment value. I read them for the entertainment value too, especially the Weekly World News.
The John Deere hat is a nice touch.
Grandma also had a framed, signed picture of President Reagan which I am sure one of the twins (my grandmother’s evil identical twin sisters) ended up with. I can’t believe the twins (who were in their early 70s at the time) had an out and out knock-’em-down, yank each other’s hair out, fist fight over her stuff. Besides some clothes and a few nice pairs of size 8 shoes, the Reagan picture was probably the only thing she owned that had any monetary value. If I know my twin great-aunts (and one of them is still alive-though the one who had the stroke died about five years ago) they were fighting over the shoes. They wore size 8s too.
I have a strong shoe fetish myself- but even should they be size 7s, I’m not fighting anyone for used shoes.
My twin great-aunts’ altercation over a few pairs of used shoes and a whole lot of worthless kitsch convinced me once and for all: I don’t need dead people’s stuff. My sisters can have it all. I am just curious when I die (they are slightly older than me, but they are much better preserved, and will most certainly outlive me) if they will brawl over my used underwear (the bras won’t fit either one of them- unless they add a little extra stuffins,) and not a few pairs of size 7 shoes that only one of them can wear. The oldest, who was my sadistic childhood nemesis, does well to fit her behemoth meaty feet into an 8EEE. The other sister also wears a 7B, and therefore, my shoes fit her.
I’ll cut out the middleman and just put my old skivvies on E-Bay now.
Or, better yet, I could E-Bay Jerry’s nasty old whitey-tighties, after he’s worn them for a night of gambling, drinking and the Hershey Squirts:
Of course, there’s a dude who’s already thought of using what appears to be a soiled set of whitey-tighties as a safe. I can sort of understand the mentality, though I would struggle with the temptation to pick out the cash and then toss the skivvies.
The replacement fridge is up and running quite nicely as of this morning. The ice is frozen and Jerry’s Natties are cold. Spuds is in the G&R, and all is right with the world.
The G&R still has the most awesome fried bologna sandwiches. And cream pies. And an original late ’80’s Spuds McKenzie.
ELYSIANHUNTER, ALWAYS INCITEFUL: 
I still have a Spuds McKenszie watch from back in the day. Maybe I should start wearing it again for the kitsch factor.
Boy, you are determined that your relatives will outlive you! I hope you have something nasty planned in your will, then. “I was the one who turned you into the IRS Uncle Max!”
Your great grandma sounds a lot like my grandma, except for the tabloids. She’s a pistol. 89 years old and still very involved in my kids’ lives.
It’s not so much that I want my sisters to outlive me, it’s just that I am the repository for every single genetic disease that runs in my family- severe essential hypertension, diabetes, bad sinuses, arthritis, etc,- with the exception of bad teeth. I have very nice straight, white teeth without benefit of oral surgery, crowns, braces, etc. but everyone else in my family has (or once had) some variant of Billy Bob teeth or worse. Abysmal dentition is the curse of English ancestry. Somehow I avoided the bad teeth but ended up with a laundry list of inherited (and some acquired, i.e. rheumatic fever, and heart valve damage) medical issues, many of which do not lend themselves to longevity. My sisters managed to escape the more serious medical issues but boy howdy did they get the disaster mouths.
My sadistic oldest sister will want my worthless shit not because she needs it (she has more money than sense- anyone who has 7 grand to blow on a wedding gown is not playing with a full deck in my mind) but because she craves control. She will want it simply so no one else can have it. This is the reason why when Grandma died Dad gave me the stuff she wanted me to have before Ol’ Grabby could rent a U-haul and just take everything. Grandma didn’t have too much of monetary value other than the WWII memorabilia and letters, etc. which Dad wisely hid away, but Ol’ Grabby would have confiscated the toilet paper rolls, and she did make off with some pretty weird stuff, just to prove to herself that she was the “favorite.” Whatever. I don’t need dead people’s stuff and I refuse to fight over it.
I miss Great-Grandma, and my other Grandmas too. They were all cool in their own ways, and I don’t doubt that both of my grandmothers saved my life- several times. It’s not easy growing up with a sadistic sibling and an untreated bi-polar mother. Nor is it very safe.:(